FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute intervention in the 2016 US election – regarding certain freshly discovered “emails of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on a device seized during an unrelated sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner” – has cast a dark Orwellian shadow over democracy in America in the early 21st century. According […]

The juxtaposition of the last days of the twisted 2016 US election campaign and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest round of “independent” appointments to the still seriously unreformed Senate of Canada casts some harsh light on what the new Liberal government in Ottawa is trying to do with this archaic Canadian institution – still too […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 25]. The big worry about the 2016 US election now is that (once again?) the forces of progress are growing too complacent and/or triumphalistic. Two of the last five national polls on both the Real Clear Politics and  Five Thirty Eight sites have Trump tied or slightly ahead. Even the more impressionistic TV […]

Letting the sovereign voters decide complex public policy questions has been given something of a bad name lately by the still quite puzzling Brexit experience in the United Kingdom. And in a Canadian city like Toronto (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, etc) you are still slightly closer to news from the UK (and/or France) than […]

I hope Dr. White is right about some new mood of bipartisan co-operation rising from the ashes, “even just vaguely,” in some reborn saga of democracy in America. And I pray David Brooks will finally prove right when he wrote last Tuesday that the day after Trump loses, “there won’t be solidarity and howls of […]

Just a  footnote to my underground report of last week – “This isn’t the first time Donald Trump has pretended to run for President etc.” The footnote is inspired by two examples of higher political journalism in the  USA today – David Brooks’s October 11, 2016 article in the New York Times, “Donald Trump’s Sad, […]

What a relief to escape, even for just one moment, from the latest crazy Trumpet playing of the “Yankee to the south of us” who “must south of us remain” – and into something allegedly more sensible, like the future of the Parti Québécois in Canada. The occasion is the election of Jean-François Lisée as […]

I bumped into L. Frank Bunting at The Rex this past weekend. And he agreed that with Donald Trump’s possibly “Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History” now behind us, the US election campaign is looking a little less like “democracy as depicted by Hieronymus Bosch.” (See his September 22 meditation on “Hieronymus Bosch back in […]