Election years, which last for 16 months now, are a period where everyone goes bonkers and nothing gets done but a lot of shouting. This year is even worse, since one of the major party nominees is a narcissistic demagogue who’s normalizing a kind of hatred that will persist in our politics for years to come.
Read the comic at The New York Times.
The Senate passed a not-great, but decent bill to address the threat of the Zika virus. The House version is garbage and uses the public health crisis mostly as a means to relax regulations on pesticides. By the time the House and Senate bills are reconciled, it will be too late to do anything meaningful, since mosquito season is already in full swing.
Read the comic at the New York Times.
It’s commencement season, and here in Boston that means there will be a bit more space on the T when the students go home.
Read the comic at The New York Times.
Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee after last week’s primary. Much has been made about his differences with the GOP establishment, but those differences are mostly cosmetic, particularly of the bottled tan variety.
I’m no campaign strategist, but it would probably be a good idea to take every opportunity to link Trump with the also hugely unpopular Republican brand rather than treat the two as separate entities. He is their standard-bearer after all.
Read the comic at The New York Times.
The primaries are winding down, and it’s pretty clear who the nominees will be. So I wanted to needle Creepy Ted Cruz once more before attention shifts to the general election, which promises to be slightly less interminable than primary season.
Read the comic at The New York Times.
New York’s primary matters for the first time in decades, and all of the remaining candidates are doing some campaign pandering in the Big Apple. Events are scheduled in the rest of the state of course, but with 8 million people, and the headquarters of the media, there’s been substantially more emphasis on NYC.
I couldn’t resist including a little Easter egg for my fellow Red Sox fans. I’m thankful baseball season’s back, where even the Yankees-Sox rivalry is more civil than electoral politics.
Read the comic at the New York Times.
I previously picked on Mitch McConnell for stonewalling President Obama just hours after Scalia kicked the bucket. McConnell’s Republican pals on the Senate Judiciary Committee are pulling the same crap and refusing to even meet with Merrick Garland. They really have no endgame, this is just obstruction for obstruction’s sake.
Read the comic at the New York Times.
Trump’s malignant shadow is obscuring everything else going on in the world. The ugliness of his campaign and its supporters is certainly newsworthy, but we’ll have a lot of catching up to do if and when the Trump phenomenon fades.
I wrote and drew this before Neil deGrasse Tyson proved himself to be no political scientist over the weekend on Twitter:
People who are anti-Trump are actually anti-Trump supporters — they oppose free citizens voting for the @realDonaldTrump.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 13, 2016
Maybe everything he knows about astrophysics leaves very little brain real estate for civics.
Read the comic at The New York Times.