"Events, dear boy, events," the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied when asked what he most feared. And events can certainly make a difference, as was apparent this week: Prime Minister David Cameron moved out of No. 10 Downing Street and Theresa May moved in. This came after British voters, against Cameron's advice and contrary to widespread expectations, voted to leave the European Union June 23.
Our own sources in and around Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana have told us what everyone else has been reporting: He appears to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. Still, to the best of their knowledge, the official call from Trump has not yet been made. We all know Trump is full of surprises, so we add this note of caution just in case. We all remember erroneous reports that John Kerry had selected Dick Gephardt as his running mate in 2004, when Kerry actually chose John Edwards. For our purposes here, we’ll assume it is true, that the GOP nominee for vice president will be Pence.
"Her mind is shot."
That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president.
Claims about racist cops from groups like Black Lives Matter lead more people to fear and hate the police.
There can be no dispute that Barack Obama was forced to wade through unprecedented bigotry in his speedy ascent to the most powerful perch in the world. His predecessor, George W. Bush, called it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
If Black Lives Matter, then why have entrenched members of the Congressional Black Caucus spent more time enriching themselves than taking care of their neglected constituents?
In their influential 1970 book The Real Majority, political demographers Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg identified the individual they saw as the American “Middle Voter.” This person was a metropolitan “middle-aged, middle-income, middle-educated, Protestant, in a family whose working members work more likely with hands than abstractly with head.” They then drilled down a little deeper: “Middle Voter is a forty-seven-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.” Scammon and Wattenberg did not actually have a specific person in mind. Their description of Middle Voter was an archetype, but after the book was published, Wattenberg said, “I do not know for sure if the lady exists. But I suspect that if you looked hard enough, you’d find her.”
After the massacre of five Dallas cops, during a protest of police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, President Obama said, "America is not as divided as some have suggested."
When the Republican and Democratic national conventions gather in successive weeks in Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively, one item on their plates will be reconsideration of their parties' nominating rules. Just about everyone agrees that they are unsatisfactory in some way or another, and many itch to do something about it.
There was never a more appropriately named book than "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald, published a few weeks ago, on the eve of the greatest escalation of that war by the ambush murders of five policemen in Dallas.
Who are you going to believe: us, or your lying eyes? That's the good word from Democratic Party powers that be and their transcribers in the corporate media, in response to the "allegations" by Bernie Sanders supporters that the nomination was stolen by Hillary Clinton.
Does Hillary Clinton possess the integrity and honesty to be president of the United States? Or are those quaint and irrelevant considerations in electing a head of state in 21st-century America?
Unindicted co-conspirator: Technically, the term, made familiar in the Watergate scandals, does not apply to Hillary Clinton, since no one has been or apparently will be indicted in the emails case.
With four months to go in the 2016 general election campaign, national polls suggest that it’s quite possible that the Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump clash may well set a new record for partisan differences between the sexes.
It took me years to figure out that markets work better than government.
So it turns out that while you can indict a ham sandwich, indicting our top diplomat for “extremely careless” handling of national secrets at a time of war against the most determined and diabolical enemy we have ever faced — well, that is just a waste of time. Inconvenient. Awkward.
There is a classic Latin epigram about double standards that resounds in the aftermath of the FBI's surrender this week to the corruptocracy:
"Nativism ... xenophobia or worse" is behind the triumph of Brexit and the support for Donald Trump, railed President Barack Obama in Ottawa.
Obama believes that resistance to transformational change in the character and identity of countries of the West, from immigration, can only be the product of sick minds or sick hearts.
"Affirmative action" will continue to be the routine course of business of college and university admissions for the foreseeable future. That's the bottom line from the Supreme Court's June decision in Fisher v. University of Texas.
There was a time when the Fourth of July meant something more than a three-day weekend. Speeches, writings and commemorative ceremonies reminded us of the origins and greatness of America. No matter where in the world our ancestors came from, we today are almost invariably better off because they came to America.
