[ Posted Friday, June 26th, 2020 – 17:29 UTC ]
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 25th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
What is the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic going to do right in the midst of an election season? That may sound like a rather crass question to be asking right now, so let me clearly state that this is undoubtedly going to involve a whole lot of deaths that probably could have been prevented -- which is an ongoing tragedy for all. We're already north of 120,000 deaths, and the total we eventually reach is going to depend in large part on how big the second wave turns out to be. That represents widespread human suffering on a massive scale. But it's also going to affect the politics of the 2020 election, one way or another, which is what I'm choosing to focus on today.
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[ Posted Monday, June 22nd, 2020 – 16:41 UTC ]
This is going to be a meta-column, just to warn everyone in advance. It's going to be a column about columns. If you think this will bore the pants off you, then now is the time to seek other content, in other words.
Behind the scenes here, I've been gearing up to kick off my election-year "Electoral Math" series once again. Throughout the campaign, we'll take a look at the polling and try to predict how each state will vote, and thus what the Electoral College vote will be after the November presidential election. These columns will run right up until the day before the election, when I'll attempt to make my final prediction. This will be the fourth run of this column series. I previously wrote these articles for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 campaigns.
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[ Posted Friday, June 19th, 2020 – 18:14 UTC ]
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
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[ Posted Thursday, June 18th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
To President Donald Trump, today's Supreme Court ruling was not actually about the hundreds of thousands of young people whose legal residence in this country hung on this court case. Instead, it was about one thing and one thing alone, which is pretty much the same thing that everything is about for Donald Trump: himself. After learning of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision denying Trump the ability to strip legal protection from the "dreamers," Trump petulantly took to Twitter to ask: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Once again, Trump reduced an issue of monumental importance to the level of schoolyard gossip (about him, of course). Maybe if the Supremes really really liked Trump, things would be different? Because that's obviously what it's all about, not all that legal mumbo-jumbo or hundreds of thousands of young people's lives.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 – 16:25 UTC ]
I have to admit I am seeing the protest movement across America from a rather strange viewpoint. I live in one of the most liberal areas of one of the most liberal states in the country, and here the citizens are deeply grieving... a police officer who lost his life. You can see why this is a rather unique lens through which to view what is currently going on.
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[ Posted Monday, June 15th, 2020 – 17:14 UTC ]
Conservative Republicans just chalked up another big defeat in their continuing losing streak in the culture wars. The Supreme Court ruled today that L.G.B.T. rights are indeed included in Title VII, which mandates equal treatment for all "on the basis of sex." Discriminating against someone because they are gay or transgendered (by firing them, for example) is just as unconstitutional as it is to discriminate against all women (or all men, for that matter). To put it another way, what could be called the final battle of the Sexual Revolution just ended, and the counterculture has now absolutely routed the field of conservatives.
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[ Posted Friday, June 12th, 2020 – 18:07 UTC ]
President Donald Trump seems to have settled on a theme for his campaign, as he doubles down on blatant racism. Think that's too strongly put? We don't. Consider the following, from just the past week:
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[ Posted Thursday, June 11th, 2020 – 16:46 UTC ]
While the overall news on the coronavirus pandemic has gotten better on a national scale, we could be seeing the very beginnings of a second wave developing in individual states. This is worrisome, but what is even more concerning is that we may be about to repeat the mistakes of the first wave all over again. The process of closing down the economy and sheltering in place was painful, and the reopening and lifting of restrictions got very political, which adds up to an enormous reluctance by governors to go through it all over again. Which, if true, would mean that the second wave may prove to be worse than the first.
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[ Posted Monday, June 8th, 2020 – 16:58 UTC ]
I know we all have plenty to worry about these days, so I apologize in advance for adding another possible item to the list. But we could be heading for a very worrisome situation indeed, because contrary to how Americans have experienced past presidential elections (well... other than in the year 2000...), we may not actually know who won on the night of the election. There are a combination of factors which have set up this rather unique situation, and it may not even come to pass if a few of these variables change by November. But the possibility now exists that we won't know for days -- or even weeks -- who won the Electoral College and thus the presidency. Which, obviously, could lead to chaos, especially considering what Donald Trump will be saying and tweeting in the meantime.
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