The 2016 US Presidential Election
Hit first, and then just keep hitting
Once upon a time, people running for office worked on making people like them. Not anymore, at least not in this presidential campaign. This one is all about making people hate…
Roger Ailes and the dark arts
Five years ago in Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson described Roger Ailes as 'one of the most skilled and fearsome' operatives in the history of the Republican Party.
As a political…
Manafort exit unlikely to end Trump's Russian fetish
At the start of this strange US presidential election cycle only a hubristic Vladimir Putin might have expected that he and the Russian-influenced world would play such a…
How Trump is playing to lose in Pennsylvania
To be the resident of a swing state is to be enormously popular in an election year. In the last week, Pennsylvania, one of the nation's 13 founding states, has had both…
Trump is not a politician, and that matters
A couple of times now I have alerted readers to the work of cartoonist Scott Adams, an unusual political observer who dismisses the idea that Trump can be usefully evaluated on…
Let's get to know the swing states: Florida
The internet is groaning with maps of the US that paint a heap of states Democratic blue, another pile Republican red and the remainder in any colour but blue or red. This last…
Trump's disastrous week: The beginning of the end?
The 2016 US presidential campaign has not lent itself to the making of definitive pronouncements or predictions about the fates of candidates. Yet we can say with some degree of…
The hack that keeps on giving
Until a little over a week ago, Julian Assange was probably suffering from relevancy deprivation syndrome after being holed up in London's Ecuadorian Embassy for years. But not…
Clinton pits togetherness against exclusion and negativity
Often marked by division between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, this week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia ended on a note of conciliation…
Democrats can't blame Putin for spectacular own goal
On 14 June the Washington Post reported a security breach of the Democratic National Committee's computer network. Citing committee officials and security experts, reporter Ellen…