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Dick Polman

Stories by Dick

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In the early minutes of Wednesday's Republican debate, while everyone on stage was studiously ignoring the fact that their AWOL rival is a serial criminal defendant, ...

By Dick Polman August 27, 2023
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In a red Ohio referendum this week, forced-birth reactionaries got blown out by a whopping margin of 430,000 votes. No word yet on whether Roe v. Wade killer Donald Trump has aspirationally asked Republican election officials to find 430,001 votes.

By Dick Polman August 13, 2023
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When George Washington was a schoolboy teenager, he composed more than 100 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior,” borrowing heavily from French Jesuits. Rules 21 and 22 go like this: “Reproach none for the infirmities of nature…Show not yourself glad at the misfortune of another.”

By Dick Polman July 30, 2023
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I get why the Republicans are so obsessed with Hunter Biden. They don’t much of anything else.

By Dick Polman June 25, 2023
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There have been so many Chris Christies that I need to number them.

By Dick Polman June 11, 2023
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Put your hands together for sane mature bipartisan centrist adulthood. It’s a whole lot better than apocalyptic bluster.

By Dick Polman June 5, 2023
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If my math is correct, the 2024 Republican presidential contest is starting to look like the Marx brothers’ stateroom scene.

By Dick Polman May 28, 2023
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If we conjure the spirit of Pollyanna, if we look on the bright side of life, we can probably convince ourselves that Fox News has suffered a guilty verdict in the court of public opinion.

By Dick Polman April 23, 2023
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Put your hands together for gun reform activist Ashbey Beasley, an anguished mom who showed up uninvited on Fox News the other day. She stormed within camera range and raged common sense to the viewers who’d probably tuned in for the usual brain-dead propaganda.

By Dick Polman April 2, 2023
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As we await word of a seemingly imminent Trump indictment, it has been highly entertaining to hear his defenders twist themselves into pretzels in order to excuse the fact he paid a porn star $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election to hide an extramarital tryst.

By Dick Polman March 26, 2023
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Nobody these days is happier with Ron DeSantis than Vladimir Putin, who now has two horses in the 2024 Republican race: Trump (naturally) and a coward who talks tough to Disney but quakes at the prospect of confronting a genocidal thug.

By Dick Polman March 19, 2023
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Put your hands together Dominion Voting Systems, the balloting firm that’s doggedly suing Fox News for defamation, seeking $1.6 billion in damages as recompense for the network’s relentless lies that Dominion’s 2020 machines were somehow rigged for Joe Biden.

By Dick Polman March 5, 2023
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Shortly before the deadly MAGA insurrection on Capitol Hill, 2020 election loser Donald Trump infamously ordered Georgia election overseer Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” just enough votes to propel him to statewide victory over Joe Biden.

By Dick Polman February 19, 2023
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The State of the Union is usually a useless stale slog that turns healthy brain cells to mush.

By Dick Polman February 12, 2023
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The good news is many Republicans want to leave Donald Trump in the dust. The bad news is so many of them are just as odious.

By Dick Polman January 29, 2023
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When news broke the other day that President Biden’s lawyers had found a few documents with classified markings in a think-tank office he once used, we all knew that MAGA’s false equivalence cops would spring into action.

By Dick Polman January 15, 2023
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As I watched President Biden sign the historic marriage equality law, his latest of many legislative achievements, I couldn’t help but marvel at how much American culture has changed during the past quarter century.

By Dick Polman December 25, 2022
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Fresh from their failures in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans have created an “advisory council” to help craft their “2024 vision and beyond.”

By Dick Polman December 11, 2022
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Those of us who love America for its traditional democratic values are exhaling sighs of relief, because - lo and behold - it turns out that the midterm elections’ purported “red wave” turned out to be somewhere between a ripple and a trickle.

By Dick Polman November 13, 2022
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My general policy is to ignore Donald Trump’s rallies, in part because his narcissistic freak shows are merely a cry for help. But mostly because his lies mount up with such rapidity that it’s impossible to knock them all down.

By Dick Polman October 16, 2022
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We all know that MAGA 2.0 Ayatollah Ron DeSantis takes a strong interest in what gets taught in Florida schools.

By Dick Polman October 2, 2022
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As a special House election loomed in an upstate New York swing district, conventional wisdom decreed that Democrat Pat Ryan would surely lose.

By Dick Polman August 28, 2022
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I can’t help but notice that the six Supreme Court justices who criminalized abortion were all raised Catholic.

By Dick Polman July 3, 2022
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To millions of oblivious Americans, “democracy” is just an abstraction conjured by dead men in powdered wigs, and “fascism” is just something with swastikas on the History Channel.

By Dick Polman June 26, 2022
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The fascist threat at the top, so well documented by the Jan. 6 Committee, is rightfully seizing our attention. But it’s also happening from the bottom up.

By Dick Polman June 19, 2022
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It’s blasphemy in certain circles to state the obvious, which is that America is not exceptional in every way and that Americans are not the peerless masters of the universe.

By Dick Polman June 5, 2022
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The writer Alan Furst has shrewdly observed, “Fascism famously stomps around in jackboots, but it sometimes wears carpet slippers, padding about softly on the edges of one’s life, and in a way that is worse.”

By Dick Polman May 25, 2022
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It’s shocking that someone within the Supreme Court enclave would take the extraordinary step to leak the draft opinion that kills Roe v. Wade and propels women back to the coat-hanger era.

By Dick Polman May 8, 2022
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Just as it’s a waste of time for Republicans to refight the results of the 2020 election, it certainly does no good for anti-MAGAs to refight what happened in the previous race.

By Dick Polman May 1, 2022
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I’m guessing that the French presidential election isn’t high on your current list of interests.

By Dick Polman April 24, 2022
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If or when Merrick Garland bestirs himself to action, he’d do well to ponder the new federal court ruling that drops the hammer on coup conspirator John Eastman.

By Dick Polman April 3, 2022
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When I hear Republicans blaming President Biden for high gas prices, I’m reminded of what scribe Mary McCarthy once said of her rival Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

By Dick Polman March 20, 2022
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During World War II, Americans put up with rationed gas and car tires, rationed coal and fuel oil, rationed silk and nylon, rationed meat and daily products, rationed jams and jellies, even rationed coffee.

By Dick Polman March 6, 2022
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I’m old enough to remember when rabid rightist Republicans proclaimed “Better Dead Than Red” and insisted that anyone who was “soft” on Russia should leave this country and go live over there.

By Dick Polman February 27, 2022
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At this point in our sick national saga, is there any law that Trump hasn’t broken?

By Dick Polman February 13, 2022
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When word spread last week about an imminent Supreme Court retirement, I hoped against hope that it would be Clarence Thomas.

By Dick Polman February 6, 2022
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Seventy years ago, in response to a fantastical-but-true event on the ball field, sportswriter Red Smith wrote: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.”

By Dick Polman January 30, 2022
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Journalists have been debating how to most effectively cover a defeated ex-president who lies as he breathes and aspires to restore his reign by any means necessary.

By Dick Polman January 16, 2022
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Has this been a great year or what? Don’t answer.

By Dick Polman December 26, 2021
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So it looks like Roe v. Wade is perched at the precipice. Gee, I wonder how that happened. Let me count the ways.

By Dick Polman December 12, 2021
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If only I had a magic wand, I would henceforth consign all conspiracy freaks and vaccine refuseniks (78 million in number) to some distant desert isle where they could breathe free upon each other until God sorts them out.

By Dick Polman December 5, 2021
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If Bill Murray were to star in a sequel to Groundhog Day, he’d wake up to the Sonny and Cher alarm clock, take the cold shower, step in the puddle, parry the insurance agent, trudge to the gazebo…and see Chris Christie doing his same old song and dance.

By Dick Polman November 21, 2021
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Democrats can certainly try to convince themselves that the Virginia gubernatorial defeat is no big deal. All kinds of rationales are available.

By Dick Polman November 7, 2021
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Don’t you feel a wee bit bad for Merrick Garland?

By Dick Polman October 31, 2021
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We’ve long known about Colin Powell’s worst public sin. He finally acknowledged it nine years ago when he wrote, “I was mad at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.”

By Dick Polman October 24, 2021
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We interrupt our regular programming of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan to bring you this bulletin about the Taliban takeover in Texas.

By Dick Polman September 5, 2021
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The Shakespeare character in Henry IV who said “Let’s kill all the lawyers” was clearly a tad over the top.

By Dick Polman August 29, 2021
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Anyone who professes to be shocked by the Taliban victory in Afghanistan has not been paying attention.

By Dick Polman August 22, 2021
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I’m literally old enough to remember when Republicans proudly branded themselves as the cop-loving guardians of “law and order.”

By Dick Polman August 8, 2021

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