In welcome news for the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a new poll shows that for the first time, he has edged past Hillary Clinton in the key state of Iowa.
[Read more…]

There has been a lot of media chatter today about Donald Trump’s derogatory comments about Carly Fiorina’s looks and her response to the insult, prompting once again the age-old question of whether it is possible for American politics to get even more trivial and the sad fact is that the answer always seem to be ‘yes’. Another flap the media is drooling over is Trump and the sanctimonious Ben Carson fighting it over who has more religious faith, as if it matters at all to governing. The media loves it when candidates trash talk each other and these will dominate the news cycle for a few days.
[Read more…]

We are witnessing yet another example of how Republican infighting is creating a chaotic legislative situation. The party has long since morphed into something in which the labels moderate and conservative no longer fit the factions within it. Instead we now have two groups better described as extremists and nutcases, the former being those who hold the extreme positions on economic issues that their oligarchic bosses demand and the extreme positions on social issues that their Tea Party base expects. This group controls the leadership of the party.
[Read more…]

Ohio governor John Kasich has been getting some good press following his performance in the first Republican debate because he seemed to come across as somewhat moderate in his views. But Kasich appears moderate only when compared with some of the more extreme anti-gay, anti-Obamacare stances taken by his rivals. It is such a sad reflection on Republican positions that all Kasich had to say is that he attended a same-sex wedding and supported Medicare expansion to be seen as some kind of enlightened person.
[Read more…]

There are some people the working of whose minds are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Take for example, Frazier Cross, a 74-year old white supremacist and a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan who shot dead three people outside two Jewish centers in Kansas last year, thinking they were Jews, though it so happened that they were not.
[Read more…]

I had ridiculed Donald Trump’s call to deport all undocumented immigrants as well as their children born in the US who are, of course, US citizens. I felt that not only was it unfeasible in practice to round up and deport 11 million people, it was unthinkable and illegal in the case of the children. So I was shocked to learn on NPR today that such a mass deportation had in fact occurred in the past during the time of the Great Depression when the pressure for jobs resulted in Mexican-Americans and their US-born children being sent away.
[Read more…]