There has been quite a lot of controversy about the presidential debates and the competing town halls between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden over whether they have been conducted on a level playing field.

They haven't.

The unfairness charges have focused on the moderators, with the most salient partisan claim aimed at the deception of ...Read more

This may be the only time I ever say this, but it's a good thing the Federal Election Commission can't do anything.

Several Republicans have argued that Facebook and Twitter interfered with the presidential election by not letting their users freely share a New York Post expose alleging that Hunter Biden arranged a meeting between his father, ...Read more

WINTERSET, Iowa - Sandy Hoenig of Winterset has been a straight-ticket Republican voter for the past 55 years. She's been active in the party since her early 20s, first as a 25-year Ames resident. Now 80, she has chaired county election committees for Sen. Chuck Grassley and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, raised funds for former U.S....Read more

Before dawn broke on Monday morning, long lines of calm and committed voters snaked around libraries and community centers across South Florida for the first day of early voting.

It was dark. It was raining. And no one was complaining.

What an impressive sight. What an impressive turnout. What a wonderful description from election supervisors:...Read more

Oh dear. It finally happened. A famous man on a Zoom call "took it out," as Julia Louis-Dreyfus' character Elaine once put it so succinctly on "Seinfeld."

According to Vice, which broke the story, Jeffrey Toobin was apparently engaged in an act of self-gratification as his colleagues looked on, one imagines, in horror.

What was Toobin thinking...Read more

Congress and President Donald Trump, having doled out $25 billion in payroll grants plus a similar sum in low-interest loans to the airline industry in April, are seeking a second bailout, possibly as part of a general stimulus bill.

The urge to rescue the airlines flows from good intentions, but it is not a smart way to help the economy and it...Read more

The socialistically inspired Sen. Bernie Sanders is still running for president, not the kind who gives an inaugural speech and sits in the Oval Office, but the kind who manipulates the person behind the desk, doing anything that works for the sake of poison policies.

Sanders has already received some concessions from Joe Biden, the confused ...Read more

The reporting done on election night 2018 offers a cautionary tale for the news media as we approach Nov. 3.

Because more than a quarter of that year's 116 million votes were mailed, initial projections of the midterm results turned out to be wildly inaccurate. They showed Democrats making only modest gains in the House, far less than the ...Read more

For a moment's respite from pandemic news that can seem unrelentingly bad, cast your mind into the future - say, to November 2021.

A world in suspended animation has awakened at last. The pandemic has subsided. New cases of COVID-19 are a rarity.

In the United States, the death toll is just under half a million. As awful as that number is, it ...Read more

Sid Hartman would talk to anyone, but those in positions of authority got special attention, whether deserved or not.

The business news desk at the old Star Tribune building bordered Sid's office, and after I became the section's editor he often stopped by with tips.

"You need to do a story on Glen Taylor's chickens," he said more than once, ...Read more

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - The University of Florida reported 25 positive COVID-19 cases among the Gators football team during the past week as UF works to quash an outbreak within the program.

The data is based on test results from Tuesday of last week through Monday, during which the school said 584 tests were performed.

Elsewhere in the athletics ...Read more

Mark down Monday, Oct. 12, 2020, as the date when Ron DeSantis officially stopped pretending that public health was more important than politics.

That's when Florida's governor walked into a packed Donald Trump rally in Sanford, high-fiving fans on his way to the stage. No mask. No social distancing. Just acting like everything was perfectly ...Read more

Advocates of "herd immunity" strategies often claim that COVID-19 is relatively safe for the young and that most of the victims are old. This observation is correct, but the question is what to make of it. Often the implication - stated or not - is that the response to the pandemic need not be so vigorous because the loss of life, as measured in...Read more

The government's quest to rein in Big Tech just took a major step forward. Two weeks after the House antitrust subcommittee issued its landmark report outlining the anticompetitive abuses of the top players, the Department of Justice made its long-awaited move against Google.

The DOJ's antitrust division announced Tuesday that it is suing ...Read more

Brigham Young University's Idaho campus is investigating reports that its students have been intentionally exposing themselves to the new coronavirus in hopes that after the illness passes their blood will have money-making antibodies.

Plasma donation centers are paying top dollar for so-called convalescent plasma, which is being studied as a ...Read more

I see y'all not wearing face masks or social distancing.

I know some of you are still congregating with friends and loved ones as if we weren't in a pandemic.

But I get it. "COVID fatigue" is real. You hardly know what to believe. So many conflicting messages.

President Donald Trump, who reportedly recovered from COVID-19 after being given ...Read more

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up two cases that arise from marquee immigration policies of the Trump administration. Here's hoping that the policies will be in the dustbin of history before the court has the chance to rule on them.

The cases center on President Donald Trump's efforts to replace and extend the wall along the U.S.-...Read more

Earlier this month in Florida, I met Esther Segura, a nurse who spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve as an operating room technician. She's spent this year juggling raising two teenage daughters as a single mom and working on the front lines fighting against this pandemic.

Esther loves helping people - she says it's in her blood. And she ...Read more

Not long after federal authorities broke up an extremist plot to kidnap or kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom President Donald Trump regularly denounces, a Trump rally began chanting, "Lock her up."

Did President Trump stop them? Of course not. His response was, "Lock them all up," a reference not only to Whitmer but to Hillary Clinton ...Read more