Tag: politics

It says something about the current condition of the Democratic Party that nearly all the votes that nudged Tom Perez over the top in Saturday’s election for chair of the Democratic National Committee were cast in the first round for the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party.

It’s an odd little world, where a Japanese company many of us still associate with the stereo equipment of our youth is brought to its knees because it can’t get concrete poured fast enough in Georgia and South Carolina.

If you think it’s swampy on the Potomac, try your average state capital, where ethics reforms pursue the “low-hanging fruit” and investigations sometimes disappear with an appointment.

The late, great Furman Bisher once referred to the Super Bowl as “the World Series of capitalism,” and that man knew a thing or two about ball games and money. More than any other event, the Super Bowl is about high rolling, from the commercials that cost as much as a feature-length film down to the hustlers on the streets.

Virtually unnoticed amid the pomp of the inauguration and the clamor which followed it, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta issued a ruling Friday which could be as important as anything that was done or said over the weekend.

Our Town, always hungry to put itself on the map, suddenly finds itself hosting the Packers in the NFC Conference championship game and the subject of a Donald Trump tweet war. Henry Grady Nirvana, in a perverse, 21st Century way.

Could it be an omen of sorts, when a bogus snow storm causes the postponement of one of the state’s most time-honored celebrations of pork, in all its manifestations?

State governments are the laboratories of democracy, they say, and last week test tubes were bubbling to overflowing on both coasts, in North Carolina and California.

Faux news is fake news that people want to believe. It isn’t just biased news, such as you see very commonly. Its falsehoods are not the result of reportorial laziness or editorial ham-handedness, but objective assessments of the audience’s gullibility.

Robert Kelley’s “The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century” isn’t an inviting title, exactly, but if you want to understand the shape of the electorate in this year’s election, this book, published in 1979, would be a great place to start.