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.
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Homer Simpson is exactly from the kind of demographic that amongst whom Donald Trump is supposed to be strongest: male, white (ok yellow, but that’s close enough), low-information, solidly middle-class, and beer-drinking, and not one of those politically correct elitists. And yet, Homer has defected.
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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.
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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
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She says that Donald Trump is going for the Richard Nixon vibe of 1968 of instilling fear in the hearts of white America and promising to bring law and order back again, except that Nixon, for all his faults, was not a buffoon. Karl Marx was remarkably prescient when he said that, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
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John Oliver reviewed the Republican convention and was astounded, as many of us were, at how the party has entered into a fact-free world. It recalls how a member of the Bush administration (suspected to be Karl Rove) derided those of us he described as being part of the “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”. Of course that was rubbish then and this belief that raw power could achieve anything led to hubris on an enormous scale and has got the nation stuck in one unwinnable war after another,
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Jon Stewart lays down one of his righteous rants, saying that the big pivoting challenge is not how Donald Trump switches to a more centrist approach (he won’t) but how the right wing media that vilified Barack Obama with all manner of false descriptions now deals with the fact that Trump actually fits those descriptions.
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There are moves to pass a contempt of parliament motion against former UK prime minister Tony Blair in the wake of the revelations in the Chilcot report, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who voted against the Iraq war, will likely support it.
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Seth Meyers looks at some of the reactions to the Dallas shootings. Note that the police in Dallas patrolling the demonstration prior to the shooting were not in riot gear but were dressed in shirt sleeves and even shorts, because that police department was one of the leaders in trying to foster better police-community relations.
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