POSTED BY MARTIN KICH There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the lack of both unified and resonant messaging by candidates on the Progressive side of the ideological spectrum. I personally think that the lack of resonant messaging is much more important, especially in these off-year elections. But here are three examples of very…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH CNN’s David Gelles has surveyed the number of times that President Trump has refereed to the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “witch hunt”: 2017-05: 3 times 2017-06: 5 times 2017-07: 6 times 2017-10: 1 time 2017-12: 2 times 2018-01: 1 time 2018-02: 3 times 2018-03:…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In this series, I have highlighted headlines that are cleverly expressed, making use of puns, irony, figurative language, or unexpected word choices to grab a reader’s attention. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has so unabashedly flouted all sorts of political conventions that headline writers have felt freer to write headlines that…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On July 18, the headline of the Los Angeles Times daily newsletter was “Trump’s Double-Negative Defense.” Trump’s explanation that the uproar over his press conference with Putin is much to do about nothing because he simply meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would” seems an attempt to reduce much broader issues…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH One of the basic logical fallacies that composition teachers warn their students to avoid is argument by analogy. No one has ever accused California Governor Jerry Brown of being uneducated or unintelligent. But, all too often, Progressives have latched onto their own harebrained ideas about “reforming” education. Of course, political brainstorms…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The results of California’s recent Senate primary have demonstrated that there are 62,830 Californians who are Nazis or very willing to vote for Nazis. In the primary, incumbent Diane Feinstein received 2,031,967 votes, or 44.2% of the 4,600,471 votes, and her challenger in the November general election, Kevin DeLeon, another Democrat,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I am sharing this update from Samantha Parsons, who along with her colleague Ralph Wilson and our own John Wilson, made a presentation on their efforts at the annual meeting in June. I know you’ve been following the court case between students at George Mason University and the school’s fundraising body,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I subscribe to the New Yorker and am very familiar with Andy Borowitz’s satiric pieces. But I did not think to put several of them together as they have been in the following item distributed several months ago by the Progressive Review in its weekly Undernews newsletter: Trump Puts Andy Borowitz…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This short item was published by Gongwer ahead of Ohio’s primary elections in May, and even in a year with more than the usual share of weird election-related stories, this one stands out: Candidate Disavowed: In an unusual move, the Ohio Democratic Party is telling voters not to cast a ballot for…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I was doing some research on Trump jokes on late-night talk shows on television, and I happened across this observation in an article published by HuffPost Entertainment in August 2017. It is the short final paragraph of “Stephen Colbert Just Earned His Biggest Ratings Win over Jimmy Fallon,” an article written…