Chris Weigant

My title today is a familiar phrase to anyone who went to school in America as a child. It seemed a relevant day to discuss the subject, since we're seeing some serious checking and balancing in Washington today. Since I don't have enough factual information on the situation surrounding Eric...

Mitt Romney, candidate for president, seems not to be able to make up his mind. George W. Bush famously labeled himself the "Decider" when in office, but it seems Mitt is proving to be the "Can't Decider" this time around.

Romney has shown this trait on several issues in the...

Marco Rubio's chances of becoming Mitt Romney's running mate just got a little worse. Granted, he is still a senator from Florida -- the biggest prize among the "battleground" states this November. But Rubio's signature issue was just completely and brilliantly co-opted by President Obama, which tends to significantly lessen...

Campaign 2012 is underway. Mitt Romney has won the right to challenge President Barack Obama for the Oval Office. The next four years of American politics hangs in the balance. One might think that, by now, we would be able to have some concrete idea of what either man would...

Program Note:

We're going to try something different today. We're going to write a short column. Well, "relatively short," I should say.

That sound you just heard was a gigantic sigh of relief from all the editors at the affiliated sites where this column appears. Or perhaps, the stunned jaws...

Maybe this election will be remembered as the "It's the jobs, stupid" election, but who knows? It certainly is the central issue the public cares about, and it certainly seems to be the subject that the campaigns are fighting most viciously on the airwaves. This is probably as it should...

We're going to open with what we'll call "Constitutional Tomfoolery, Part One" (you'll note that this implies, through a technique known as "foreshadowing," that the Republicans have exhibited some sheer silliness in reference to our country's founding governmental compact more than once in the past week). John Brunner, Republican candidate...

Republicans in the state government in Albany, N.Y., are attempting to pass a law that would ban anonymous comments on the Internet (to articles such as this one, or even to websites such as the one you're reading this on now). That clever login name you came up with?...

In a few weeks California will hold its primary election. Not much news will be made, because the two major parties' presidential candidates are already known. But this election will be different for Californians in a major way, because when the general election rolls around in November, there will likely...

So, it's official. Disco is dead. The passing of Donna Summer brings to a close an era in American music that... well... if you didn't live through it, it's hard to explain. Especially the outfits people wore in public. And making John Travolta a movie star (although he did atone...

Is the Republican Party going to have a PUMA problem on its hands during its national nominating convention? I'm not, of course, referring to the possibility that mountain lions will be stalking folks inside the convention center, but rather that a group of folks under the "Party Unity, My Ass!"...

In a few weeks' time, this column will begin its quadrennial series on analyzing the presidential Electoral College math. Since, as any fifth-grader will tell you, we don't have a national vote for president, tracking the race by means of national polling is almost completely irrelevant to the question of...

We're throwing our usual format away today, because this was a momentous and historic week in American politics, and we thought it needed the entire column to address. Call it an extended rant, rather than talking points. There are two parts to this rant. The first is positive. The second...

The media -- pretty much all of them -- just got "played," by the Obama campaign. And they don't even realize it yet. What we just witnessed, for roughly the past four days, was not a "breaking story" or even an "evolution" of any sort. What we just witnessed, capped...

Has Mitt Romney painted himself into a corner? More and more, that's the question I find myself asking. During the primary season, Romney was forced to tack farther and father to the right, to convince the Republican primary voters that he was conservative enough for them to vote for (without...

If you've been hiding under a rock somewhere all week, you may have missed the fact that an anniversary just happened. One year ago this past Wednesday, special operations forces killed America's "Enemy Number One," Osama bin Laden. When it happened, it was a time for some sober reflection --...

Hitting the ceiling?

President Barack Obama had another uneventful month in the polls last month. I realize that's a pretty dull way to start a column, but we do the best with the data we are given, so to speak. Obama's average approval rate and disapproval rate both got better...

Jimmy Kimmel is right... sort of. In this past weekend's schmooze-fest between media organizations and the president (and, for some inexplicable reason, Hollywood), Kimmel performed a comedy routine for the president and the assembled crowd. Toward the end (around 19:40 in this video) Kimmel made a few marijuana jokes....

We begin by saying we certainly hope we can live up to such an exuberant headline. You will have to judge for yourself whether all those exclamation points were justified or not.

The real reason for such titular excitement is the convergence of two contests here at Friday Talking Points...

Mitt Romney is now embracing his inner Etch A Sketch, it seems. With the news that even Newt Gingrich has finally decided that the race is over, Mitt now has no real obstacle along his way to securing his party's nomination for president, or to cement his support...