Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Charlie McCarthy Gave a Speech Today to the Detroit Economic Club

Today Donald Trump gave a speech in Detroit describing some economic policies he’d like to pursue if he became president, and like with his other periodic “policy” speeches, he sounded as if he was encountering the speech, and the substance therein, for the first time as he sleepily read it off a teleprompter. But that doesn’t mean that […]

The Bizarre and Manipulative Crusade by Centrist NYT Columnists to Persuade Clinton to Adopt the Republican Fiscal and Regulatory Agenda – [with update]

All the experts tell us not to pay too much attention to polls for another week or two. Still, it does look as if Hillary Clinton got a big bounce from her convention, swamping her opponent’s bounce a week earlier. Better still, from the Democrats’ point of view, the swing in the polls appears to […]

Go, Michigan!

A new Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll finds Clinton up nine points among likely voters in Michigan, 41-32. Note that the pollster says Clinton has a “shocking” lead in the GOP regions of the western and southwestern parts of the state. But Trump told us he is going to put Michigan in play, because he’s doing so awesomely among […]

Bursting Damn. And Its Sole Cause.

GOP fundraiser Meg Whitman, a former Hewlett Packard executive, says she’ll endorse Hillary Clinton, arguing that Trump is “dangerous” and a “demagogue”: “She revealed that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had reached out to her in a phone call about a month ago, one of the first indications that Mrs. Clinton is aggressively courting Republican leaders.” One […]

Trump almost certainly no longer has any chance to win Florida, the northern third of which is chock full of families connected with the military. [UPDATED.]

TRUMP: I think I’m going to to do great in Ohio, we’re going to do great in Pennsylvania, I think I’m going to do great in Florida and I think I’m going to do great in states that some people aren’t even thinking about. Because I’m different than Republican candidates, than other Republican candidates. I’ve got states that […]

About That Optimism Thing …

Watching the Democrats’ smoothly staged, potently scripted convention last week, voters could easily think that Hillary Clinton has this election in the bag. The critiques of Donald Trump made devastatingly clear that he’s a preposterous, dangerous candidate for the presidency. The case for Clinton was compelling, and almost every party leader who mattered showed up […]

I KNEW IT, I KNEW IT, I KNEW IT!!!

Okay, folks, here’s the deal.  Specifically, this happened this morning: A federal appeals court on Friday struck down North Carolina’s requirement that voters show identification before casting ballots and reinstated an additional week of early voting. The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was an overwhelming […]

Brownshirts

The Clinton campaign has been strangely remiss in not publicizing the Trump campaign’s aggressive screening of journalists at Trump’s events—especially its denial of press credentials to several news media organizations, including the Washington Post and Politico. But this report by Paul Farhi, the Washington Post’s media reporter, this morning, titled “Post reporter barred, patted down […]

Trump Invites China to Hack His Emails—and Uncover All the Details of His Business Ties to Russian Oligarchs. Cool!

Well, by now y’all know that Donald Trump held a press conference today at which he invited Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server and retrieve the 33,000 emails she deleted.  When questioned about the propriety of encouraging anyone—much less a foreign power—to commit cybertheft, he said Russia probably already had the emails and […]

What Bill and Hillary Clinton Don’t Get: That the way to win Rust Belt white blue-collar voters isn’t to go centrist; it’s to go economic populist.

The changes to the platform testify to the strength of the Sanders campaign, and, like that campaign, they are a sign that the dynamism within the party arises right now from its left­wing faction, led by politicians like Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. What is less clear is if Mrs. Clinton is […]