Victims aren't always virtuous. That's a sad lesson that people learn from life. Human beings have a benign instinct to help those who are hurt through no cause of their own. But those they help don't always turn out to be very grateful.
Issue one!
To understand John McLaughlin, it was helpful to have been a 13-year-old entering an all-boys Jesuit school in the 1950s.
"I did it my way," crooned Sinatra.
Donald Trump has just made changes, again, in his campaign's top leadership, shoving aside the seasoned Paul Manafort and installing Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon and veteran pollster Kellyanne Conway. He's obviously acting in response to his falling poll numbers nationally, in target states and even in some states that have been safely Republican in recent elections.
Who would have thought that Donald Trump, of all people, would be addressing the fact that the black community suffers the most from a breakdown of law and order? But sanity on racial issues is sufficiently rare that it must be welcomed, from whatever source it comes.
New Hampshire may just have four electoral votes, but it’s important. If you doubt it, just ask any Granite State citizens, and they’ll tell you about their first-in-the-nation primary. Even that quartet of electoral votes can matter; in 2000, if Al Gore had just won them (and without Ralph Nader on the ballot, he probably would have), Gore would have been president even without Florida. He didn’t and he wasn’t.
The Loathsome Cowboy rides again.
We've heard nonstop criticism of both the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates -- for good reasons. So are their running mates any better?
We keep hearing that "black lives matter," but they seem to matter only when that helps politicians to get votes, or when that slogan helps demagogues demonize the police. The other 99 percent of black lives destroyed by people who are not police do not seem to attract nearly as much attention in the media.
On Sept. 30, the end of fiscal year 2016, the national debt is projected to reach $19.3 trillion.
On Friday, Republican National Committee and Trump campaign staffers held what one described as an "emergency meeting" at the Ritz Carlton in Orlando. The obvious subject: what to do about Donald Trump's flagging campaign and how Republican down-ballot candidates can avoid the possible (likely?) downdraft.
"I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged," Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve.
Google "Donald Trump" and "nationalism" and you'll get 1,090,000 results, the large percentage of which are, to judge from the top hits, negative. "Nationalism" is deemed to be bad stuff, maybe even akin to Nazism.
The Time for Change forecasting model has correctly predicted the winner of the national popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. This model is based on three predictors — the incumbent president’s approval rating at midyear (late June or early July) in the Gallup Poll, the growth rate of real GDP in the second quarter of the election year, and whether the incumbent president’s party has held the White House for one term or more than one term. Using these three predictors, it is possible to forecast the incumbent party’s share of the major party vote with a high degree of accuracy around three months before Election Day.
I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. She's a liar.
But I can't vote for Donald Trump. He lies almost as often.
COLORADO SPRINGS -- My adopted hometown will soon be the base of operations for a new Netflix movie starring aging elitist hippies Robert Redford (estimated net worth: $170 million) and Jane Fonda (estimated net worth: $120 million).
A state economic development commission unanimously voted last week to fork over $1.5 million in taxpayer-funded "incentives" for the liberal duo's romantic flick, arguing that it will generate "great publicity."
Another exciting week in the 2016 Trump Presidential Spectacular and another week of political obituaries predicting Donald Trump’s imminent demise.
Serious question: How many political obituaries have these people written about Mr. Trump since he descended into the fetid American political swamp on a glass escalator last summer?
We expect to hear a lot of lies during an election year, and this year is certainly no exception. What is surprising is how old some of these lies are, and how often they have been shown to be lies, years ago or even decades ago.
The scholar Francis Fukuyama has been widely ridiculed for the title of his 1992 book, "The End of History." Critics point out that we've had -- suffered -- a lot of history since then: the 9/11 attacks, prolonged wars in the Middle East, a worldwide financial crisis and deep recession.
"Isolationists must not prevail in this new debate over foreign policy," warns Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The consequences of a lasting American retreat from the world would be dire."
To make his case against the "Isolationist Temptation," Haass creates a caricature, a cartoon, of America First patriots, then thunders that we cannot become "a giant gated community."
