Tom Wakely

A week or so ago, the editors of Scientific American did something I never saw them do before-- they took a partisan political stand. They didn't mention any names, but it's clear they had two rotten characters in mind, Donald J. Trump and one of his top enablers in Texas, House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith. Smith's district is not some backward hellhole like Louie's Gohmert's district.

In his darkly dismal and negative-- albeit low energy-- foreign policy speech in Youngstown yesterday, Trump was hawking some kind of an ideological test for immigrants and even would-be visitors to the U.S.

Lamar Smith and Roger Williams-- this is not Austin, TexasIn 2003, Tom DeLay did Travis County in. It was part of a masterplan that brought Texas from a state with 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans in Congress to one with 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats.

For nearly a decade now, the Republican Party in the House thought it would be funny to appoint anti-Science neanderthals to the House Science Committee.

There are 10 American cities with a population of a million or more. Each one is a Democratic Party bastion. But the battle for the control of Congress this year is likely to be decided in the suburbs of these cities. And with the Trumpanzee cratering among suburban voters, in theory the Democrats should find suburban swing congressional districts very rich ground. So these are the 10 biggest U.S.

This morning, New York's Richard Hanna became the first Republican congressman to publicly announce he's actually voting for Hillary Clinton, telling his constituents that Trump is "unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country." It's politically safe for him; he's retiring in January.

Last night Russ Feingold's campaign sent an e-mail to his followers saying that "Donald Trump just encouraged Russia to commit cyberattacks against Americans... Trump held a press conference on national security that reaffirmed just how truly dangerous he is-- and utterly unfit to be the president of the United States." He's the law and order candidate? That actually sounds illegal.

Indiana's somewhat senile retiring lobbyist-turned-senator, Dan Coates, called Ted Cruz "a wrecking ball" yesterday and added gratuitously that "he's the most self-centered, narcissistic, pathological liar I’ve ever seen." He went on to accuse Cruz of trying to hurt the Republican Party.

I'm guessing few Bernie supporters will dance to the siren calls of the orange-faced racist, xenophobic, misogynystic sociopath no matter how many times he waves an anti-TPP banner at them.

I readily admit that I don't know what transpired when then-Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy decided who to put on the House Science and Technology Committee.