— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — This piece was posted at Political News Items earlier today. It’s posted here to enable non-subscribers to read it. You can subscribe to Political News Items (14 days free!) by…

What follows is my take on what happens next at CNN, now that Mr. Licht has been overthrown by the locals. There’s a case to be made that WBD should put CNN up for sale and use the proceeds to clean up its balance sheet and invest in core “products.”…

Ron DeSantis says that Donald Trump is a loser and that the time has come for Republican primary voters and caucus attenders to leave him behind and get on with the task of winning elections. This is an odd way to address Trump voters, to put it mildly. …

1. Daron Shaw, University of Texas at Austin professor of government, top pollster and Fox News Decision Desk team member, made an interesting point the other day. I can’t find the transcript, but this is the gist: The second choice of Trump voters is DeSantis. …

What follows is the most recent edition of Political News Items. If you would like to sample the newsletter, you can do so by clicking here. Political News Items can be found in the “Newsletters” tab. The offer is “first month free.” You can unsubscribe at any time. — —…

One of the least convincing arguments in politics is “electability.” The pitch is that “electability” trumps belief(s) and that primary voters should therefore get with the program and do the right thing. Which is: Vote for the candidate who asserts that he or she is the most “electable.” It has…

Long-time News Items subscribers have heard me bang on about Fox News as follows: “the audience programs the network, not the other way around.” Yet more evidence for this assertion arrived recently in filings by the voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox for defamation and seeking $1.6…

This first appeared at Political News Items, then at News Items and now at Medium.com. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the recent past, everyone became a “strategist.” I get up early in the morning to begin assembling News Items…

1. Veteran political analyst Tom Edsall had a typically interesting column last week that included the following paragraph (slightly reworked by me): Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, summed up the discontent among rural voters (in the 2016 general election) as follows: “It had three elements…