While most of the attention in this year's midterms has been on Senate and House races, there is another important contest that I'll also be watching Election Day. Alaska will be voting (for the third time in the last six years) on what sort of elections system the voters prefer. And I for one think it would be a shame if an initiative on the ballot there -- which would change the elections system back to how it was before it was reformed in 2020 -- winds up winning. I say this because I have been a big fan of the reforms they did manage to institute, so I sincerely hope Alaska voters will retain their current system.

I wrote about the new system back in 2022, when it was first put to the test (in a special House election to replace Representative Don Young, who had died unexpectedly while in office). The title of my article was "Alaska's Goldilocks Ballot Reforms," which gave an indication of how I felt about it. It truly was an elegant and workable compromise between two competing ideas for ballot reform: ranked-choice voting and the "jungle" primary.

Continue Reading »

I return to an old advertising adage for the title of today's article. Because sometimes no matter how much money you pump into advertising a product, "If the dogs won't eat the dogfood, the ad campaign will fail in the end." Or a slightly different version: "If the dogs won't eat the dogfood, it won't sell. I don't care how many pretty pictures you put on the packaging." In other words, if the product itself is crap, it won't matter how brilliant the ad campaign is or how much money you throw at advertising, because people aren't going to buy your product, period.

Continue Reading »

I am beginning to feel something that I haven't felt for a long time in politics: optimism. Cautious optimism, to be sure, but still hoping the future is going to turn positive rather than negative. I say this with exactly four weeks to go until the midterm congressional elections.

Democrats continue to have the wind at their backs. Donald Trump's approval rating just keeps sinking lower and lower. He has no clue what he's doing with his war of choice with Iran, and American consumers are paying the price for his cluelessness in a big way. The Republicans have no answer for any of the biggest concerns voters have, and the energy on the Democratic side is incredible while the Republicans are disillusioned and disenchanted.

Continue Reading »

War is changing. That's not too surprising, since war has always been changing. New offensive weapons appear, giving one army superiority over another. Such advances can win battles and even whole wars. New defensive weapons are developed to counter the threat, so even newer offensive weapons are then developed. The cycle never stops, really. And this has been true since the beginning of time, so it really shouldn't be surprising that it's happening in a big way once again.

Continue Reading »

Let's begin this week with a stunner of a statement -- one that you might not have noticed in the news: Donald Trump apparently now wants to sell weapons to China.

The mainstream media has been doing a pathetically bad job of covering Trump for over a decade now, but you would think that news of this magnitude would have broken through. You'd be wrong about that, for the most part. The fact that the president of the United States is even contemplating selling weapons to China, at any other point in modern history, would have been a blockbuster of a story. All the other politicians would be weighing in on the subject (hopefully, to denounce it as a monumentally stupid idea). Pundits would be talking about it for weeks. But it was such a minor story that it appeared as a tiny blip and then sank like a stone beneath all the other idiocy emanating from the White House.

Continue Reading »

So the Senate has left Washington, to head out on the campaign trail for the rest of this month. Before they scarpered off, Republicans tried to pass a few bills that were no more than performative -- they seemed like they were doing something to address a problem, but when you actually examined the details, they really weren't. Democrats denied the Republicans some wins that they doubtlessly would have made a big deal of back home to the voters (but that wouldn't have lived up to the hype).

Continue Reading »

Donald Trump is being forced to face a rather brutal political reality. His popularity and approval ratings are reaching new lows, even among his fellow Republicans. This is evidenced by his first big foray into the midterm campaign season. What is pretty obvious from the announced stops on his campaign tour is that few Republicans in close races want their own president to campaign for them. This is actually a common thing to happen to a president whose approval ratings have headed south. Instead of boosting the chances of a candidate from your own party, all of a sudden a presidential appearance at a rally tends to do the opposite. Which seems to be what Trump is now having to cope with.

Continue Reading »

Since we're now only five weeks away from the midterm congressional elections, it's time once again to take a quick look at all the competitive Senate races. The map has been expanding, as more and more states that used to be considered solidly in the Republican column have moved to being close races. This is obviously good news for Democrats, since it provides them with multiple ways to win back control of the chamber.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to reclaim the Senate. They are playing defense in four states -- states that have been in Democratic hands up until now. They are playing offense in ten states now (although a few of them admittedly have to be considered the longest of longshots).

Continue Reading »

Last week, Iran offered Donald Trump an offramp. Days later, Trump announced he was refusing to take it. The offer reportedly came after a meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, where the two sides talked for the first time in months. Iran essentially offered up virtually the same deal that was agreed to in the Memorandum Of Understanding earlier this year, except with a one-week timeline. Trump turned it down.

Trump called the deal unacceptable and said he hoped that talks between the two sides would continue. This is more than a little strange, seeing as how he had indeed accepted basically the same deal earlier this summer. Perhaps he has figured out by now that the M.O.U. deal was indeed heavily tilted towards Iran's demands, while addressing virtually none of America's priorities. It was a bad deal to begin with, in other words, which Trump may have belatedly figured out.

Continue Reading »

Donald Trump just hosted the leader of China on a state visit, and in the end it turned out to be a total flop. No big announcements happened, no big deals were cut, in fact nothing much of anything took place, other than Trump trying desperately to impress Xi Jinping with his new heliport and all the other laughable modifications he's done to the White House. Xi wasn't notably impressed (of course), but he did promise two more giant pandas would be heading to America soon, so that's something, at the very least.

The truly epic part of this failure at summitry was that none of it was caught on the television cameras. Which must have thoroughly cheesed off Trump, for whom an event that doesn't appear on television simply does not exist.

Continue Reading »