Joel Mathis

Great piece by the New York Times about Harvey Weinstein's decades-long pattern of sexual harassment, but the Times makes one editorial choice I find weird and even a little upsetting. It uses this picture with the story: It's worth noting, of course, that Weinstein is connected to and moves among powerful figures. Yet this photo feels ... unnecessary. It's not the picture of Clinton with him that bothers me. It's the picture of Clinton laying her hands on Weinstein, who we are learning in this story is a serial sexual harasser . The combination of the two factors makes the picture look like something that it's not. I'm not one to obsess about the Times and its treatment of Clinton. I think her emails and Clinton Foundation practices were fair game for inquiry - and hell, I supported her during the primary season. This feels unnecessary, though. A little bit like piling on. Ick.

I've got a story to tell, one that's out there on the public record, but one that hasn't been much remarked upon. He lied. Did American democracy die? It takes place during the Obama-Romney campaign of 2012. During the campaign, Mitt Romney was proving reluctant — as Donald Trump was, after him — to release some pertinent personal financial information. So Sen. Harry Reid, then the leader of Democrats in the Senate, decided to make a big deal about it . Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office. “Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying. “He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look? I wrote at the time that "Reid

Ari Fleischer makes the case that Trump is justified in treating the White House press corps like an unruly child: The press hasn’t been kind to Donald Trump—and that isn’t its job. That job is to cover the news in a fair manner. But as the Columbia Journalism Review reported in October, campaign-finance disclosures show that those who work in journalism gave $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, with more than 96% going to Mrs. Clinton. I hated the CJR report when it came out and still do. First, $396,000 is barely a drop in the campaign finance bucket. On its own, it sounds like a big number. Relative to the actual number of journalists, it's microscopic. So CJR's headline on the original piece — "Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash" — is the kind of clickbaity sensationalism CJR might well criticize in other circumstances. But let's take a closer look at the report itself. NEW YORKER TELEVISION CRIT

In response to my complaints that Hillary won the popular vote even while losing the Electoral College, my friends who are (ahem) perhaps more faithful to the Constitution as written point out — correctly — that the Constitution has a number of “countermajoritarian” features, that the American government was designed as a republic instead of a straight democracy in order to ensure the majority couldn’t tyrannize the minority. In fact, they say, the Electoral College is an important one of these countermajoritarian features because it gives individual states more of a role in selecting the executive, instead of leaving it a straight-up popularity contest. There’s pretty strong evidence, though, the Founders didn’t intend the popular vote losers to regularly win office. One feature of the old — failed — Articles of Confederation  is required a supermajority (nine of the 13 states) to pass legislation. Which meant a single state, or a small minority of states, could muck t

I'm seeing friends, right and left, suggest that Hillary Clinton failed to land a knockout blow against Donald Trump in tonight's debate. I'm not so worried: I think Clinton knows, after Friday's release of the "Billy Bush" tape, that she's ahead on points, and she doesn't have to work too aggressively to win the championship. Here's the problem: She's a woman named Hillary Clinton. This is the woman who commentators tell to smile more one debate, smile less then next. She's a woman who faces the same issue many professional women do — act too aggressively and you're a bitch. Moderate your presentation and you come across as a shrinking violet. No woman can win by those standards — indeed, they're not supposed to. Hillary, after decades in the public eye, is ultra-aware of the dynamic. So: If she presses the case too hard against Trump tonight, there's an excellent chance that lots of post-debate pundits are using b-word e

The conventional wisdom so far is that Hillary Clinton is so personally unpopular that she might be the only Democratic candidate that could lose the presidential race to Donald Trump. I have an alternative theory. Hillary's the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump, at least this year. Donald has turned all the subtext of politics into text, and thus — in the primaries, at least — all but turned the campaign into a dick-measuring contest: He beat his GOP opponents mostly by displays of dominance: "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "No Energy Jeb." The TV news coverage looked less like a campaign and more like nature documentary footage of wild predators establishing a clan's alpha male. Watching Hillary play rope-a-dope tonight — baiting Donald, then watch him bluster and interrupt while she smiled calmly — it occurred to me she's not playing the dick-measuring game. She was content to poke him, then step back and let him re

The relationship between Republicans and Hillary Clinton is akin to that of the one between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. One has relentlessly pursued the other across the decades, and in the process things have gotten messy. Should Hillary Clinton win the presidency — an outcome much to be hoped for given the other likely possibilities at this point — the hunt will continue. Republicans have pursued every misstep and unfortunate occurrence by the Clintons as though each and ev ery incident was in and of itself an IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE, a high crime and something almost certainly more than a misdemeanor. Sometimes there was more there than at other times, but it didn't matter: Every bad thing that occurred in proximity to the Clintons became worthy of a years-long Congressional investigation, or inquiries by off-the-reservation independent counsels who exceeded their mandates to find something, anything, that would put a final nail in the coffin. (All of this sprang from a pre-deter

Wonder if Hillary has a sexism problem? Read this morning's column by Danielle Allen in the Washington Post: Consider her slogan, “Fighting for us.” For many men, this slogan would have to be experienced as emasculating.  Wait. Really? Are America's men really so easily afflicted with a sense of emasculation? A woman fighting for them? Rightly or wrongly, the slogan rubs the wrong way in relation to traditional notions of masculinity.  Apparently so. Her slogan itself reveals a limited conception of who she seeks to represent.  This, I don't get. "Us" is a fairly broad and innocuous term. The only way the slogan could be more rhetorically inclusive is if it it was "Fighting for us AND them." But that, uh, would present its own set of challenges. How does Allen suggest Clinton overcome her problem? Personally, she should meet his insults with a cheery silence, or a lighthearted deflectionary joke. Don't want to seem like an angry f

Good question. Easy answer. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I think we all remember how that worked out.

Gonna cast a ballot for Hillary, hope she defends the progressive gains of the last eight years, and pray she doesn't choose to needlessly invade a Middle Eastern country. It's a gamble.

The decision between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in next week's Pennsylvania primary has been a tough one for me — though my heart says "Bernie," my head says "Clinton," largely because I believe he can't deliver on his vision but that she can, at the very least, defend and cement Democratic gains of the last eight years. But NYT Mag 's story, " How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk " reminds me that I think she's shown some awful judgment on the foreign policy front, and it includes this — to me — chilling sentence: Well then. Here's my problem: That awful summation doesn't change my earlier assessment. But I'm not interested in supporting her hawkishness. What's a dovish lefty to do? Root for Bernie to hang around a little longer, I think. There's been some talk this week, after Clinton's win in the New York primaries, that Bernie should bow out for the greater good of the Democratic Party. I don

From the comments: The polls I've seen show Trump doing better against Clinton than Sanders. Said another way, people seem to be willing to vote for Sanders over Trump to a greater extent than they are to vote for Clinton over Trump. So in terms of who can win the general, it seems the better choice is Sanders. I've heard this several times. I'm skeptical. I think, quite simply, that the GOP has been so hung up on its internal battles that it hasn't turned its attention to Bernie yet. But when it does, I fully expect the full extent of the GOP's "turn the Dem candidate into an America-hating demon" forces against him. It's possible Sanders could still win the election — Obama and Bill Clinton both survived the process and won the presidency. But I'm not sure he'll be much more electable once Republicans decide to target him in earnest. Sanders could possibly beat Trump more easily than Clinton could today; will that still be the case in

Yesterday, I wrote why I am - begrudgingly - leaning toward Hillary over Bernie in the primary. A Facebook friend admonishes me: We throw around this label "hawk" without much thought for what it means - it's a vaguely distasteful moniker. What kind of body count do you imagine is tied to Clinton's particular "foreign policy experience"? How much suffering? And to what end? Whose ends?    You usually write as a sort of demonstration of the conscience of the center-left. But in this piece you devolve into the sort of nervous gamesmanship that has for decades undermined progress on issues you obviously care about.  The suggestion - and lots of Bernie fans are making it - is that Hillary essentially disqualified herself with support for the Iraq War. I'm ... sympathetic to that argument. And I'm even sympathetic to the "nervous gamesmanship" allegation my friend lobs at me. But I don't think nervous gamesmanship is necessarily a

I haven't finalized my voting decision yet — I'm still in play — but with about three weeks to go before the Pennsylvania primary, I find myself leaning towards support for Hillary. It's a close call. Hillary Clinton voted to invade Iraq. And her performance as secretary of state suggests that she's altogether more hawkish than I would prefer. I used to think that her hawkishness was a political pose — meant more to disarm Republicans than as a guide to actual policy. I don't believe that anymore, or at any rate I don't think it matters anymore: She functions as a hawk, therefore her internal beliefs don't matter all that much. I've said before my heart remains closer to Bernie Sanders , and that remains true. America, I think, is headed for an economic reckoning — the problem of economic inequality is probably the problem of our time, and he's the candidate who seems to take it most seriously. So why the lean to Hillary?

Well, I'm unusually harsh about President Obama in this week's column for Scripps: President Obama might make a great senator someday. That's the thought that occurred Tuesday night as Obama vaguely described a "set of principles" that would set America on course toward its energy future -- even as he lamely admitted to being "unsure exactly what that (future) looks like." Senators have the luxury of noodling around with legislation, haggling and negotiating until a bill comes into shape. Presidents, on the other hand, are supposed to offer leadership -- a concrete plan of action. So far, Obama is failing the test. Unfortunately, there's nothing new to this. Obama spent the first year of his presidency being overly vague about what he would and wouldn't accept in a health-reform bill. The result? Senators took the lead, spending months in confusing and nearly fruitless negotiations while an antsy public grew increasingly angry. There

Over at Slate, Hanna Rosin asks if the Tea Party is a "feminist" movement. To the extent that "feminist" isn't used as a synonym for "liberal woman," I think the answer is probably ... no. Yes, women are taking lots of leadership roles in the Tea Party movement -- and good for them! -- but I'm guessing that movement might lose some of its coherence if it became focused on "women's issues." That said, I'm always perplexed when journalists turn up these types of folks: For the last few years Anna Barone, a Tea Party leader from Mount Vernon, N.Y., has used the e-mail handle annaforhillary.com: "The way they treated Hillary is unforgiveable, and then they did it to Sarah Palin," she said. "I've been to 15 Tea Party meetings and never heard a woman called a name just because she's powerful. I guess you could say the Tea Party is where I truly became a feminist." Wait. Really ? Don't get me wrong