Last night, at the Republican shrine of Saint Ronald of Reagan, seven Republican presidential candidates appeared on the same stage to debate each other. Of course, the real winner of the debate was the candidate who didn't show up: Donald Trump. Even the moderator, at the very start, had to get a little snarky about this, beginning with: "Let's meet the candidates who have qualified -- and chosen -- to be on the stage tonight...."

Not too surprisingly, the second debate shared one glaring similarity with the first: utter chaos. The networks hosting these debates have a hard choice to make -- they can either cut off (or heavily dial the volume down) the microphones of all the candidates who did not just get asked a question, or they can just succumb to the fact that Donald Trump has changed debate rules forever (by not having a shred of decorum or respect for the rules). This was made obvious once again, last night.

Read Complete Article »

It's almost time for the second Republican debate, although we're still waiting to hear who exactly will be allowed on the stage Wednesday night. Just as in the first debate, frontrunner Donald Trump will not be on the stage, not through being disqualified in some way but because he has decided (once again) to stage his own event in an effort to "counterprogram" the Fox debate. Trump has a big problem with the Ronald Reagan presidential library where the debate will be held, but even without that dynamic he still likely would have skipped this one as well. He is -- quite accurately -- figuring that there isn't a whole lot of upside for him showing up, since he is already so dominant in the polling at the moment. So once again we're going to see all the candidates who have yet to truly challenge Trump's standing with Republican voters bickering among themselves.

Read Complete Article »

Program Note: As I mentioned last week, I am playing hooky today. So I went looking for a column to re-run and came across this one, from almost exactly eight years ago. It's stunning in the sense of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, since it wouldn't take much more than changing a few names to be almost perfectly relevant today. It was written the week that John Boehner announced he was stepping down from being speaker and retiring from politics. At the time (as you'll see), Kevin McCarthy's name was being bandied about as a replacement, but ultimately Paul Ryan was chosen as a sort of sacrificial lamb instead.

Read Complete Article »

Donald Trump hasn't changed. That was my big takeaway from watching his performance on this week's Meet The Press, where Kristen Welker started her new stint as host of the program by scoring a blockbuster interview with Trump. This is the first such interview he has given in a long time: on network television which is not part of the right-wing echo chamber. And it went about how you'd expect (assuming you haven't been in a coma for the past eight years). Trump flooded the zone with lies, distortions, conspiracy theories, and general blithering, and the poor benighted host simply couldn't keep up. So two big takeaways, really: Donald Trump hasn't changed, and (sadly) neither has the media.

Read Complete Article »

No, wait... that can't be right...?

Sorry for opening with some snark, but we felt that was the appropriate tone for addressing this week's legal developments. Republicans have been swearing up and down for years now that President Joe Biden's son Hunter somehow bribed his father to use his position as vice president to do... well, something nefarious... and that all they really needed to do was dig into it all and the evidence would then appear.

Read Complete Article »

We hate to do this (as we suspect we'll be doing it recurringly for the next year or so), but once again the biggest political news of the week came from the legal system. Almost all the news was from the Republican side of the aisle, because of course it was. (And we promise that our subhead this week will be explained in due time, too... but not until the very end of the column.)

Read Complete Article »

I wrote about post-debate polling last week, but I may have drawn my conclusions too soon, if the latest two polls are any indication of movement. So I thought I'd revisit things today, since Labor Day traditionally kicks off the meat of the primary campaign season. (Plus, it'll get me back in the swing of talking about politics, after the 3-day holiday weekend.)

Read Complete Article »

It is rare in American politics when Democrats manage to win a political "messaging" war with Republicans, but it certainly seems like they've got a doozy of an opportunity to do just that, on the issue of lowering prescription drug prices. This messaging battle really began in earnest this week, and so far Republicans are losing badly.

Read Complete Article »

Could we finally be approaching the official end to the federal "War On Weed"? That possibility now exists thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services, who just made a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Agency. And while it is not the unconditional surrender that pro-cannabis activists have been hoping for, it certainly would be the first major retreat in this metaphorical battlefield ever. If the H.H.S. advice is adopted by the D.E.A., the federal government would scale back a position that can only be described as "Draconian," and instead adopt a position that is a whole lot closer to reality.

Read Complete Article »

Overall, tonight's first Republican debate was pretty entertaining, at least to me. These days, the entertainment value of a debate is a lot more important than scoring any kind of ideological points, so I'm using the same scale everyone else will.

There wasn't a whole lot of actual debate about differences in ideology... some, but not a lot. It was instead more of a series of one-on-one shouting matches between two of the candidates. More on those in a moment.

Read Complete Article »