Security clearances

It is the custom for presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties to get security briefings from members of the intelligence agencies, presumably so that they have a better awareness of foreign policy issues and are better prepared when one of them eventually takes office. They do not have to get security clearances for this purpose. This briefing process is not required by law but has evolved over time and has been uncontroversial.
[Read more…]

Trump’s tax returns

It is clear that Donald Trump is anxious to not follow the tradition now extending back many decades of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. The practice began in 1963 with candidate George Romney (father of Mitt) who released 12 years of returns. Since then, almost all presidential candidates and every eventual Democratic and Republican nominee has done so.
[Read more…]

Trump’s lack of self-control

I am finally back home in Cleveland after being away for about ten days to deal with some personal matters and am now catching up with a lot of the political news that I could only superficially skim while away.

Following the two conventions much commentary has been devoted to contrasting ‘the sky is falling rhetoric’ of the Republican convention with the more sunny vision of the Democratic one, which challenged Donald Trump’s claim that he will make America great again by saying that America is already great.
[Read more…]

The dilemma faced by progressive Muslim Americans

A huge amount of media attention has been given to the short speech by Khizr Khan, with his wife Ghazal Khan by his side, on the last night of the Democratic convention.

Khan, whose son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, 27, died from a suicide bombing in Baghdad 12 years ago, said Trump’s shifting proposals to ban Muslims from entering the country would have prevented his late son from serving in the military. The Khans, originally from Pakistan, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s from the United Arab Emirates.

[Read more…]

Stephen Colbert supports my idea for voting

In order to deal with the problem of people voting against a candidate rather than for him or her, as seems to be the case with the Clinton/Trump match up where majorities say that their vote is driven by their dislike for the opponent, in a segment he adopts an idea that I suggested back in 2014, but which I don’t claim to be original. He had also apparently resurrected his old Comedy Central persona during the conventions and ran into some trouble with the corporate lawyers
[Read more…]

Sanders’s religion

The revelations that emerged from the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails merely confirmed what many of us already strongly suspected, and that was that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee were lying when they said that they were staying neutral during the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They were actively tilting the playing field in her favor.
[Read more…]