The Dash Files

  "I'm a social moderate, a strong fiscal conservative..." If you hadn't read the title of this article, and I told you to guess which politician said those words in a campaign speech, what would your guess be? You would probably say a New England Republican like Charlie Baker or Chris Sununu. Maybe a red-state Democrat like Joe Manchin or Andy Beshear. Nope. This was said by the new governor of the dark-blue state of Maryland, Wes Moore. Normally, after the incumbent President's party receives a 100 megaton carpet-bombing in the midterm election, the national press will get very excited about the possible candidates for the party out of power. For example, Scott Walker received a huge amount of national attention in 2014 after winning a third election as governor in four years (one was a recall), which eventually propelled him to a run for President in 2016. But after democrats' shocked the national press by playing to a well-earned draw against republicans i...

There are four main things that make American politics interesting and newsworthy: Election campaigns, Congress doing the work of legislating, a scandal, or a war. Without any of these four things, the political news cycle begins to starve. For this reason, the first half of the third year of a President's term is sort of a political Purgatory. The third year of a President's term comes off the heels of the midterm election, so there is no active campaigns occurring. In the midterm election, the party out of power has usually made gains in Congress, often flipping a chamber or two, making Congress deadlocked, and not passing any significant legislation other than continuing resolutions and the occasional budget compromise. And unless the President is in really big trouble from a scandal, or we're actively bombing brown people on live TV (see 1991), there's no real news. That is exactly the position where we find ourselves today, but that doesn't mean the media will ...

There are not many more annoying talking points that come from the American right than the idea that the news media has an inherently liberal bias. Unfortunately, when you say something over and over again for a sustained period of time, people begin to believe it. And the news media, especially CNN, has placated to the right-wing to feel neutral. One could write countless books filled with evidence collected scientifically that could prove how the media does not in fact have a liberal bias. Oh wait, they have. One of those books: Al Franken's Liars and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them . But I do not have the time nor the proper degree to write a book and analyze hours of CNN footage. So if you need scientific evidence for why there is no such thing as the liberal media, go read that book. It's a fantastic read.  Here at the Dash Files, we're going to prove that the mainstream media is not "liberal" by simply showing you the news they pump out. We're going to cal...

Ron DeSantis, the newly re-elected governor of Florida, is all but at the top of the GOP political universe. Although he still trails Donald Trump in most 2024 primary polls among republican voters, he is the only republican who has ever looked like he can actually beat the MAGA King, with the small exception of Ben Carson's two months of frontrunner status in the fall of 2015. But if Ron DeSantis can truly depose Donald Trump, it will not because he defeated the Trump political brand. His appeal to republican voters does not rest on a large swath of principled conservative voters who are fed up with Trumpism - the bullying, the cruelty, the disregard for compromise and civility, and the hatred of democratic principle. Such a voter, with the exception of a lonely 5-10% of the GOP, simply doesn't exist anymore. There is no such thing as a Never-TrumpISM voter. Ron DeSantis represents the new phase of Trumpism. Trump's original 2016 candidacy, especially within the republican...

  June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump rode down his stupid golden escalator and announced his comical run for President in front of a crowd of paid actors for the purpose of getting higher ratings than Gwen Stefani, was the official beginning of the Trump Era. And that era has not ended, and will probably not end until one of two things happens - Trump dies or Trump goes to jail, and if he goes to jail, it probably still won’t be over until we have to inevitably defeat the republican nominee promising to pardon him, or just beat Trump while he campaigns from his jail cell. The Trump Era, our present time, has all but destroyed members of Congress from states won by the other party.  The senate class of 2016 was the first class to be victims of the Trump Era and for the first time in modern history, every state voted for a senator of the same party as it voted for in the presidential election. And as a result, republicans Mark Kirk of Illinois and Kelly Ayotte of New Hamps...

On January 19th, two days from now, the United States will hit the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on how much money it can borrow. Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, has said that she can initiate "extraordinary measures" to allow the United States to pay its bills, but the extraordinary measures will run out by early June. If Congress doesn't vote to raise the debt ceiling, the United States will default on its credit for the first time in history, and we will begin to witness the slow-motion implosion of the world economy. This looming fiscal "crisis" is completely manufactured and sourced from the Republican Party. They want to live in a world where the federal government does not provide for its own citizens through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Such an opinion, though cruel and selfish, is something conservatives in a free country are fully entitled to hold. But in a normal democracy, politicians take their political opinions to the ...

It may be disheartening that democrats lost the House, but this is not like 1994 or 2010, when republicans won back large majorities that were unbreakable without a midterm blue wave. With Democrats' political prospects over the next two years lightening by the day, they are in a great position to make back their majority in 2024 and possibly make it bigger than it was in 2021-2022. 2024 will a presidential election year, which means the House is going to largely mirror the results of the 2024 presidential election. I'm going to immediately presume Donald Trump is the GOP nominee and Biden is the (both small d and capital-D) democratic nominee, because no blue-chip Democratic politican would be crazy enough to challenge him, and Donald Trump still leads Ron DeSantis in the polls, even after hitting his political rock-bottom in the midterm aftermath. Until there is a cataclysmic event that upends every aspect of our politics, any other scenario goes against the logic of the univ...

 Originally published 10/15/2022 Depending on how much you have been paying attention to the coverage of the midterm elections, you may be seeing different headlines, but any news source outside of BobsBlog.com will be telling you that the democrats are DOOMED to lose the House in 25 days, and DOOMED to either lose the Senate or be stuck again with 50 democrats and 50 republicans and Joe Manchin will continue his reign as the king of corruptive corporate evil for another two years. They are wrong.  This is why: 1. The polls are off - in the OTHER DIRECTION The common consensus among everyone in the media and any casual political observer is that the polls are completely and totally biased towards democrats, and unless a democrat is leading by a billion percent in the polls, they’re losing. And to be fair, they have somewhat of a good reason to believe this, because in 2016 and 2020, we were fooled into believing that the democrats were way ahead in the polls, and reality came ...