So a former reality TV star won the 2016 presidential election on Tuesday. While deeply disturbing, that victory by Donald Trump was somehow altogether fitting. After all, as research from Harvard revealed, throughout the 2016 election cycle "policy issues [were] nearly absent in presidential campaign 'coverage.'" Even during the four weeks surrounding the parties' nominating […]

Washington is experiencing a bipartisan furor over the spiraling price hikes of EpiPen, the life-saving Epinephrine injector tens of thousands of American allergy sufferers depend on in case of emergency. On Wednesday, Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Republican Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee blasted Mylan CEO Heather Bresch over […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In his first major address since turning over the reins of his campaign to Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump provided two notable--if not laudable--moments. For starters, the Republican offered a blanket apology, or more accurately, an "unpology." That is, his expression of conditional regret applied only in unspecified circumstances in which "you don't […]

The grief and suffering of the families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 must be unbearable and interminable. Only someone with the most hardened heart would fail to understand their pain and anguish. But that doesn't mean the latest efforts of some of the relatives, enthusiastically supported by Republican hardliners, to […]