Category: Tom Baxter

Suddenly, a dinner named after two Democratic presidents is politically incorrect. But the real problem is state Democratic parties are having problems selling tickets to their annual fundraisers as they lose influence at the state level.

Is voter anger a driving force in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, or is that just the template that gets pulled out every four years to explain what’s going on?

What do you do when you’re producing a televised debate and you’ve got 17 candidates? Instead of relying on the polls to sort things out, which was a terrible idea, maybe Fox News should have called in some experts who’d know how to pull it off, such as Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak or Tim Gunn.

It was a fairly obscure issue of international trade policy which brought the Senate into a rare Sunday session this past weekend, but if you drive, it was important to you, too. And if you wonder why it’s so hard for Washington to get a handle on the nation’s problems, Sunday’s session was a case study.

The debate after last week’s murders in Chattanooga wasn’t about whether there were too many guns involved. It was about whether there were enough guns. That’s emblematic of how the national discussion over guns has changed since the Sandy Hook school massacre.

First the great de-flagging, then Atticus Finch. This roiling summer of 2015 has been enough to incite a rash of unflattering reflections on the South, and southernness, updated with the perspective of a young century but rife with criticisms which stretch back to the British Isles.

Would a soft drink taste as sugary, or the engine of an expensive car hum as seductively, if it didn’t have a logo to burn its brand into our consciousnesses? Would we feel like we’d voted if we didn’t stick that peach on our chests? Logos are simple things, but as the governor of Tennessee and the presidential campaigns have learned, they can be very complicated

This year the American taxpayer’s certificate of honor is IRS Form 14039, the Identity Theft Affidavit, which hundreds of thousands of us have been required to file along with a paper copy of our tax returns.

The way last month’s shootout in Waco has been covered says a lot about the way the media packages reality for mass consumption. Some times, you can’t connect the body count with the theme of the moment.

They are Washington’s new odd couple: Curly and Mo, companion senators from the Bluegrass State with conflicting ideas about what, in political terms, defines red. Last week, the tense relationship between Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and presidential candidate Rand Paul came under new strains.

Georgia got a taste of the 2016 nomination race over the weekend with a visit to the state GOP convention by three presidential hopefuls. That’s only about 20 percent of the total field, which isn’t likely to get smaller very soon.

Texas is a big place, there’s no debating that. In these times, it’s also a big place adjusting, often uncomfortably, to a world growing smaller and smaller.

If we could draw a box around our nation’s history over the past two decades, four great disasters would form its corners: the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. The four disasters divide the 20-year-span pretty evenly, but we don’t remember them that way.

Last week there were a couple of stories, little noticed in the United States, which may have been significant steps in the rapid evolution of cyberwar. It’s a war with new battlefields, and strange alliances.