Category Archives: Trump

Debate #2

I did not rush to write after the second debate of this presidential election season, the first between vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. I, along with the majority of the debate watchers, was not going to change my voting plans as a result of the ninety-minute session. I tuned in for the spectacle. And, it appears, I had a lot of company. The debate drew an impressive audience of 67.1 million viewers. This was a big increase from the 51.3 million viewers for the first debate, the one between President Joe Biden and Trump.

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Execution, Gaza Style

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi.

Say their names. Say them out loud. Think of them as individuals, not simply as six hostages, abducted during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by terrorists from Gaza.

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Chicago and the DNC

The 2024 Democratic National Convention is about to begin in my hometown. I am worried.

In the summer of 1968, I was between my junior and senior years in high school. After a string of the usual summer jobs, delivering clothes for the local tailor, bagging groceries at the local supermarket, this summer I had a “real” job. I was writing computer programs for the City of Chicago. It was a big secret in those days that if you ignored a parking ticket in Chicago, you would never hear from the city. That was because the city’s traffic court, which had a crew of one hundred patronage workers dutifully typing the data from each ticket and each mailed in payment onto computer punched cards, no one had written the programs to match the two card decks and print out notices threatening arrest to the scofflaws who hadn’t paid.

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Veepstakes

The consensus view holds that the candidates for vice president have little impact on voter’s choices in a presidential election. I have no evidence to refute this. But I do have a kind of gut feeling that the people slated to fill the number two position on the ticket may have more influence than usual this time around.

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The Prosecutor and the Felon

More than a month ago I wrote about the poor performance of President Joe Biden in his June 27th 2024 debate with Donald Trump. Then I put politics aside, frankly, having had enough for a while.

Did I miss anything?

Seriously. If Aaron Sorkin wrote a script describing the events of the last few weeks, nobody would believe it.

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Form and Substance

There is no sugar-coating it. President Joe Biden had a train wreck in his first 2024 debate with Former President Donald Trump. Fifty-one million watched. I wrote that I had concerns because Biden had seemed physically feeble during some appearances in the last year. Right as he walked out on the debate stage, I saw those signs, Biden walking slowly and speaking slowly and in a soft scratchy voice. I did not expect to see him ramble and become incoherent, but he did that more than once. At other times he was clear, combative, and effective, defending his administration and listing his accomplishments. But you could not fail to notice the other moments.

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Trump Guilty

Donald Trump is now the first president to be tried and convicted of a crime, a Manhattan jury finding him guilty of falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to a porn star. It is the third time a jury of his peers has found him guilty, the previous two cases involving civil lawsuits for sexual abuse and defamation.

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