Let's say you owned a house and needed extra cash to make ends meet, so you decided to rent two of your bedrooms. Would you agree to lease those rooms to two people under the condition that you could only run a credit check on and meet one of them? Would you allow an anonymous rando to move into your second room, no questions asked, not even what their name is?
"Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician." So says Hillary Clinton of her former Senate colleague and 2016 rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders.
We live in history-making times. Not so much because of the impeachment trial going on in the Senate, which will make history only if it routinizes impeachments of impolite presidents when their opposition party gets control of the House, but because of what looks like an ongoing battle for control of the central narrative of American history.
Watch cable news, particularly CNN or MSNBC, and hear how the “walls are closing in” on President Trump. Impeachment is underway, a solemn and sober process, celebrated by House Speaker Pelosi handing out autographed pens during the impeachment article signing ceremony. One would think she was signing landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act given the pomp and circumstance.
But the Senate remains a bright spot for Republicans amidst decline elsewhere.
— After just three years in the White House, Donald Trump is seeing a significant erosion of down-ballot seats held by his party.
— This erosion puts Trump in good company — at least since World War II, presidents typically experience at least some erosion across his party’s numbers of U.S. Senate, U.S. House, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats.
— The best news for Trump and Republicans is that they have held their own in the category of races that is arguably most politically important: the Senate.
The latest, lawless migrant caravan hurtling from Honduras to our southern border is as organic as AstroTurf.
Reporters complain about business. We overlook the constant improvements in our lives made possible by greedy businesses competing for your money. Think about how our access to entertainment has improved.
Almost all of us know (because President Trump boasts of it in nearly every speech) that our 3.5% unemployment rate has reached a 50-year low. But this official decline in joblessness doesn't tell the entire story of the improvement in the job market in the United States. And it doesn't fully capture the change in direction between what happened under President Barack Obama and Trump.
On the holiday set aside in 2020 to honor Martin Luther King, the premier advocate of nonviolent Gandhian civil disobedience, thousands of gun owners gathered in Richmond to petition peacefully for their rights.
Russia -- OK, not the actual Russian government but a private troll farm company located in Russia -- bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that the small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Donald Trump ads. And especially except that $100,000 in Facebook ads can't affect the outcome of a $6.8 billion election.
About the impeachment of President Donald Trump she engineered with her Democratic majority, Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday: "It's not personal. It's not political. It's not partisan. It's patriotic."
Seriously, Madam Speaker? Not political? Not partisan?
Elections are a form of communication. Voting tells politicians, and the press if they're capable of getting the message, what citizens will tolerate and what they won't. The Democrats haven't voted yet, but they've been campaigning for more than a year and have just had their last debate before the Iowa caucuses two weeks from Monday.
— The Kansas Senate race is getting a lot of national buzz, but we still see the GOP as clearly favored to hold the seat.
— The chances of Republicans springing Senate upsets in New Hampshire and Virginia appear to be growing dimmer.
— Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) decision not to hold a special election for CA-50 makes it likelier for Republicans to hold the seat.
— Vermont is a sleeper Democratic gubernatorial target.
In November, I was banned in Boston after speech-squelchers on the left and right forced the cancellation of my lecture at Bentley University, a small private institution. The grassroots activists who had invited me were rejected by every major event venue in the nation's purported Cradle of Liberty. The tail-tuckers cited security concerns or jacked up their rental fees to make it prohibitively expensive to gather peacefully to discuss -- gasp! -- ideas.
People who want to work should be allowed to work. That includes people who once went to jail.
Over the holidays, I read Elton John's biography, "Me." He writes about his friendship with Freddie Mercury, the ultratalented lead singer of the rock group Queen. Mercury tragically died of AIDS at the age of 45 in 1991. Mercury was one of the last people to die of the disease in Britain during the epidemic years. John writes sadly and almost offhandedly that if Mercury had lived one year longer, he probably would have survived because of the AIDS medication that eventually saved millions of lives.
The directed killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran's blood-soaked field marshal in the "forever war" of the Middle East, has begun to roil the politics of both the region and the USA.
Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years."
In all the reportage and commentary on the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, I haven't seen much mention of an interesting parallel between the Iranian mullah regime's attacks on America this past week and its attacks when it first came to power 40 years ago.
— Nationalization has pushed urban and rural areas apart; Maine and Nebraska are no exceptions to this trend, and their unique electoral vote allocation systems are highlighting that division.
— The Omaha-based NE-2 supported Republicans in the past two presidential elections, but by decreasing margins, and could feasibly vote blue in 2020.
— Maine’s two districts, once political mirror images of each other, have drifted steadily apart. The Crystal Ball sees Donald Trump as a favorite to carry ME-2 again, though Democrats should retain the state’s other three electoral votes.
— In a close national election, Maine and Nebraska’s respective second districts could provide potentially decisive electoral votes.
