Tim Walz

Cockburn knew Taylor Swift was trouble when she walked in. Too much time in Hollywood (Cockburn saw it coming when she switched genres from country to pop), has turned the Tennessee Christian girl into a "childless cat lady" who just endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Swift took to Instagram immediately after presidential debate to declare: Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most. As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can about their proposed policies and plans for this country.

The Harris-Walz campaign is depending on Americans feeling so rushed this election that they don’t pay attention to the vice president’s dramatic evolution. Last week, CNN’s Kasie Hunt interviewed Harris-Walz campaign senior spokesperson Ian Sams and discussed polling that shows Democrats are losing working-class voters. “What is it about what you guys have been doing for the last three-plus years that explains that?” Hunt asked. Sams’s attempt at a non-answer was actually quite revealing. “We’ve got sixty days until the election,” he replied, exasperated. “You know, we don’t have time to sit around and think about why, over the last few years, certain things may have happened or may not have happened.

This is one very strange presidential campaign.  That’s not just because it seems to go on forever. This one seemed to begin shortly after Eisenhower left office. It’s also because there have been two general election campaigns in a row. The first pitted Donald Trump against Joe Biden and ended with Trump’s decisive victory. The clincher was Biden’s humiliating debate performance, which showed the world what his aides, his party and a compliant media had been hiding: the president was suffering serious cognitive decline.  Once voters had peeked behind the curtain, they were convinced Biden could not serve another four years. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was competent to serve now. That question still hovers, unanswered, over the White House.

Chicago You get freedom, you get freedom, we all get freedom! At least that was the pitch from Oprah Winfrey who gave a surprise speech at the Democratic National Convention. The celebrity talk-show host and businesswoman received the most raucous applause of Wednesday night’s festivities and ignited the crowd like none other of the evening. But it’s still unclear exactly what “freedom” the Democrats are talking about besides the ability to terminate your pregnancy up until birth. Yet even Oprah couldn’t make us forget the enduring awkwardness of Joe Biden being forced out of his reelection campaign. Who could help but raise their eyebrows when President Bill Clinton claimed that Biden had “voluntarily” relinquished power?

For years, Tim Walz has claimed that he and his wife Gwen used in-vitro fertilization to conceive their two children Hope, twenty-three, and Gus, seventeen. The Minnesota governor has weaponized his emotional journey to attack Republicans opposed to the procedure and used it to lockdown the VP slot on Kamala Harris’s protection of reproduction rights ticket.   But the New York Times reports — giving Walz the softest of soft landings — that in fact his wife had intrauterine insemination, or IUI, to conceive, not in vitro fertilization, or IVF.  There is a huge difference between the two procedures, as Walz knows. Principally that there are no moves by Republicans to use the overturning of Roe v. Wade to ban IUI.

From the moment Kamala Harris ascended to the status of 2024’s bringer of joy, the vice president has navigated a world where the media has been overwhelmingly positive about her presence at the top of the ticket. But if there’s one thing we know about the media, they dislike being ignored. It’s a sign of disrespect, you see — we helped Joe Biden off the slow ramp, we praise you to high heaven as and the deal is you sit down for an interview — quid pro quo, Kamala! Obviously, the Harris-Walz ticket hasn’t done this — and it’s starting to get under the media’s skin.

In an era of declining trust, the military retains widespread public confidence — 61 percent as of a Gallup poll this year. Large majorities of Americans look up to those who wore the uniform and associate serving in the military with positive stereotypes like self-discipline, loyalty and responsibility. Politicians and our political system? Not so much. Only 26 percent of Americans have confidence in the presidency, and confidence in Congress stands at 9 percent. It’s no wonder that both parties recruit military veterans to run for office, hoping that the halo from their service will soften the sharp edges of political reality and garner crossover appeal come election day.