Reprinted from the prepared remarks of Hillary Clinton in Reno, Nevada on Thursday. Thank you, Reno! It’s great to be back in Nevada… My original plan for this visit was to focus on our agenda to help small businesses and entrepreneurs. This week we proposed new steps to cut red tape and taxes, and make it easier for small businesses to get the credit they need to grow and hire. Because I believe that in America, if you can dream it, you should be able…
Senate Democrats, aware of the dead weight that Donald J. Trump has placed on their vulnerable Republican colleagues, can taste a reclaimed majority. But just as Senate Republicans blew their chances in 2010 and 2012 before finally taking control in 2014, Democrats find themselves hobbled by less-than-stellar candidates in races that could make the difference in winning a majority. In Pennsylvania, Katie McGinty, a relatively unknown former federal official who has never held elective office, is ahead in polls but lags Hillary Clinton’s large lead…
Stories about the ramshackle nature of the Trump campaign are abundant. A recent article called Donald Trump’s organization “more concert tour than presidential campaign.” A 12-year-old appears to be running Trump’s field office in a populous Colorado county. Sixty percent of registered voters — and even 40 percent of Republicans — believe that Trump’s campaign is “poorly run.” This is obviously unprecedented in modern presidential elections. Typically, the candidates have similar resources and campaign organizations. Typically, it is difficult for one candidate to have a large…
As I write these words, American pundits and political junkies are struggling to come to terms with some curious, even alarming, developments. Donald Trump has claimed the Republican presidential nomination while advocating a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States and the construction of a wall along the Mexican border. While many would blame his rise on the particular dysfunction of the G.O.P. or of America’s political culture more generally, a larger context makes that view impossible. A populist and sometimes xenophobic campaign succeeded…
On August 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. “I’m doing a (free) operating system,” he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this would just be a hobby. But it became something bigger. Much bigger. Today, that open source operating system—Linux—is one of the most important pieces of computer software in the world. Chances are, you use it every day. Linux runs every Android phone and tablet on Earth. And even if you’re on an iPhone or…
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of welfare reform, a law that profoundly changed the nature of public assistance in America. While its liberal critics worst predictions may not have come true, the reform’s legacy has nonetheless diminished after decades of careful study. There are even good reasons for conservatives to feel ambivalent. On the one hand, welfare reform eliminated an entitlement (AFDC) and replaced it with TANF, a block grant to states that added work requirements to cash welfare and caused caseloads to plummet. It…
The hunt for exoplanets has been heating up in recent years. Since it began its mission in 2009, over four thousand exoplanet candidates have been discovered by the Kepler mission, several hundred of which have been confirmed to be “Earth-like” (i.e. terrestrial). And of these, some 216 planets have been shown to be both terrestrial and located within their parent star’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks zone”). But in what may prove to be the most exciting find to date, the German weekly Der Spiegel announced…
With the looming general election face-off between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there has been a relentless push to dull any criticism of Clinton, for the sake of sparing the country a Trump presidency. The notion that any reproval—thorough or otherwise—of Democratic candidates leads to a Republican outcome has long been a typically unarticulated condition, one that leads to less accountability, more capitulation, and the unequivocal silencing of left detractors who are arguably necessary elements in the pursuit of much needed political reformation. The coddling of…
The New York Times considered it news the other day that Sean Hannity gives advice to Donald Trump, whom he has publicly and repeatedly endorsed. The tut-tutting tone of the piece, coming from a newspaper as baldly biased as the Times, is comic. […] It is a newspaper of, by, and for liberals, yet the author of the column, Jim Rutenberg, acts like he is speaking from Olympian heights of neutrality. He writes: “Mr. Hannity told me his support for Mr. Trump makes him ‘more…
Starting next year, Google could begin sending less traffic to mobile websites if they make use of interstitials—the pop-ups that can take up users’ screens, often with advertising. The change is a blow for some online publishers and website operators who rely on interstitials to generate advertising revenue as users enter their websites via Google searches. In a post published Tuesday on the Google Webmasters blog, Google product manager Doantam Phan wrote, “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other…