Charles Krauthammer is a prominent neoconservative commentator who has been reliably Republican for as long as I can remember. But he is also one of the few Republicans who have been critical of Donald Trump. In his latest column, he points out some examples of Trump’s ridiculously grandiose claims that I and other commentators have missed, and how his supporters simply lap it up.
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I have said that I am sick of this election and can’t wait for it to be over. But who am I kidding? In the US, we are now in the stage of permanent campaign mode, where the process for the next election starts before the current one even ends. This can be traced to the fact that unlike in most countries where only the maximum duration of a person’s or government’s term is fixed and elections can be, and often are, held before the end of it often with very short notice, in America the date is pretty much written in stone and so ambitious people can plan their strategy well in advance.
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Andrea James writes about something that I have noticed and that is that reducing the number of lanes on a road, what is called a ‘road diet’, and replacing the lost ones with a center lane meant only for turning left, can produce many benefits, not the least of which is that it reduces the number of opportunities for accidents.
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I do not have time (or the stomach) to follow the appearances and antics of Donald Trump’s surrogates on the various TV talk shows. I see news headlines of this or that surrogate tying themselves up in knots trying to explain away Trump’s statements or poor performance in the debate but I rarely follow up on them because I don’t think they matter. Who cares what surrogates say? Surrogates are useful for filling up the time on the 24/7 cable talk shows but for little else. Does anyone’s choice of who to vote for ever get swayed but what a surrogate says or does?
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The Guardian reports that Nigel Farage, the one-time leader of Britain’s xenophobic, pro-Brexit party UKIP, may coach Donald Trump before the next debate. As usual, there have been mixed signals from the Trump camp. The message from Trump himself is that he won handily and that implies that he does not need any debating advice. But others in the party and his camp are worried that he may repeat his widely panned performance and want to try and steer him away from another poor showing.
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A couple of days ago we had yet another report of the shooting death of an unarmed black man by the police. The police say that he had been acting suspiciously. It seems like this is happening every other day and it got me thinking about how differently one assesses risks of death at the hands of the police depending on one’s ethnicity or socio-economic status.
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As we have seen, Donald Trump seems to place a great deal of importance on women’s looks. Matt Pearce writes that when he visited his properties, he would tell the managers to fire any woman on the staff that did not meet his standards and replace them with prettier women, and the managers had to scramble to find workarounds in order to save those women’s jobs.
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At the Labour Party conference held two days ago, newly–re-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn surprised observers by delivering a powerful speech that resulted in a standing ovation. It was a call for Labour to return to its socialist roots and reject the words of the doomsayers who think that neoliberalism is the way of the future and that Labour is heading to its doom. You can read the full text of his speech and here are some short excerpts.
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