Last Sunday on the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley spoke with House Speaker Paul Ryan. One exchange caught my attention. Pelley: Trump tweeted, in the last week or so, that he had actually “…won the popular vote, if you deduct the millions who voted illegally.” Do you believe that? Ryan tried to dismiss this with a smile and...

It didn’t take long for President-elect Trump to show us the difference between what he said during his campaign and what he says now. During the campaign, Trump called President Obama “incompetent.” In last week’s Oval Office meeting, Trump now calls Obama, “a very good man.” During the campaign, Trump said that Obama is “very stupid,” and “the founder of...

While the results of Tuesday night’s stunning upset – by a man who has never served an elected office – will be analyzed and parsed for months and years to come, here are some observations, both general and ethical. – The vast majority of pollsters and media, armed with the latest technology, did not come close to getting it right....

I have written about Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump for more than a year now. Why? His disdain for people and institutions is beyond anything ever seen before. As CEO of Conspiracy Central, his statements range from the bizarre, “…what was [Ted Cruz’s father] doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the… shooting?,” to the bizarrer: “The concept of...

In the waning days of the his campaign, Donald Trump has been setting the table to spur supporters’ anger after November 8th. “Jon A. Husted,” The New York Times reports (Oct. 16), “the secretary of state of Ohio, said it was ‘wrong and engaging in irresponsible rhetoric’ for any candidate to question the integrity of elections without evidence. Mr. Husted,...

Watching the news last week, I was jolted out of my seat by Connecticut Senator Elizabeth Warren’s withering condemnation of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. As reported in the Boston Herald (Sept. 21), “ ‘You should resign,’ Warren told … Stumpf… during a Senate Banking Committee hearing yesterday. ‘You should give back the money you took while this scam was...

I never intended to write about the first debate. However, several readers, in private emails or conversation, have made that request, so, here goes. Monday night’s event, (Yes, I went to the movie and recorded the debate), the first of three presidential debates, was, as expected, packed with drama: e-mails, taxes, climate change, race, defense, cyber terrorism, stamina, and the...

Well, boys and girls, here we are – the first of three presidential debates which may decide who goes to the White House: the Reality Star, or the Politically Calculated Czar; the extremely reckless, or “extremely careless.” I was previously invited to attend a screening of The Man with the Golden Arm, part of an Elmer Bernstein film series honoring...

After five long years (Remember, Trump was the first to announce his own investigation into Obama’s citizenship status in 2011: “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” ), Donald J. Trump finally announced, (Sept. 16): “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.” It doesn’t matter to Trump (or sadly, many...

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.                   – John Adams, in his defense of British soldiers wrongly accused of the so-called “Boston Massacre.” In my 2011 e-book, Shameless, I wrote that supporters of political critics Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn...