David Farenthold of the Washington Post on Tuesday broke a huge story about the rampant wrong-doing at the Trump Foundation. Donald Trump, Farenthold revealed, "spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire's for-profit businesses." But if the Republican nominee's "self-dealing" as president of the Trump Foundation […]

In late 2007 and 2008, the United States and the global economy were devastated by the subprime crisis. That financial calamity was so named due to the hundreds of thousands of foreclosed upon homeowners who were unqualified for the loans they received from mortgage originators around the country. The disaster did not result from the […]

The article below ("The Othering of the President") originally appeared on February 23, 2015 in response to Rudy Giuliani's obscene claim that "I do not believe that the president loves America." But with Donald Trump's presidential campaign trying replace its old Birther slander with a new one (that the Birther movement itself was started by […]

In 1993, the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous paper, titled "Defining Deviancy Down." Lamenting the rising rates of crime, homelessness, and family breakdown among other American pathologies, the social scientist and member of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations warned, "We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt […]

It was one of the defining moments of the 2012 presidential campaign. "Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917," Republican Mitt Romney charged during the third and final debate, adding, "Air Force is older and smaller than at any time since it was founded in 1947." President Obama responded with overwhelming […]

For the second straight week, Republican nominee Donald Trump has continued his much-hyped "outreach" effort to black voters. But as the recent polling suggests, Trump is failing to convince African-Americans that he will "build the future" of the Party of Lincoln "on his legacy." That's in large part because in words and in deeds, Donald […]

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tied into a pretzel over immigration; on Wednesday night in Arizona he will try to extricate himself. But for all of the talk about a new, "humane" approach with its "baby steps" towards the ejection of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, nothing about […]

When it comes to its electoral strategy, it's not often that a presidential campaign gives the game away so easily. This week, new Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway did it twice. Last Sunday, she personally confirmed that Donald Trump's laughable outreach to black voters wasn't intended for African-Americans at all. "I live in a white […]

And now some helpful advice for Republicans pretending to diagnose Hillary Clinton by video: it won't go well for you. Back in the spring of 2005, Senate Majority Leader and physician Bill Frist (R-TN) told his assembled colleagues that he disagreed with Terri Schiavo's doctors that she had suffered massive, irreversible and permanent brain damage. […]

Over the past few days, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump received the equivalent of a Little League participation trophy. Some in the press lavished praise on the "new Trump" for offering an ersatz apology to no one in particular for nothing specific. Then the man who has the lowest approval ratings from African-American voters in […]