President's brother defects
President Barack Obama may have made an impassioned speech at the Democratic National Convention for Hillary Clinton to be elected president in order to carry on his policies last week, but at least one person is not buying it - his half-brother, Malik.
Malik Obama, a Maryland accountant, told the New York Post he planned to vote for Donald Trump, expressing "deep disappointment" with how his brother has run the country.
The president's older half-brother, 58, best man at Barack and first lady Michelle Obama's wedding, said he'd been a lifelong Democrat but will switch to the Republican Party for this election.
"Mr. Trump is providing something new and fresh," Malik Obama said, adding he didn't like his brother's administration (including Clinton) helping overthrow former Libyan head Moammar Gadhafi, the FBI's unwillingness to charge Clinton after she used an unsecured email server and the Democratic Party's embrace of same-sex marriage.
"The way that he's turned and become a different person with the family is the same way that I see him behaving politically," he told filmmaker Joel Gilbert in 2015. "He says one thing and then he does another. He's not been an honest man, as far as I'm concerned, in who he is and what he says and how he treats people."
When history is not history
All the sheep at the Democratic National Conventional last week weren't following the flock, as the Hillary Clinton campaign found out.
After she officially was nominated for president, the "Hillary For America" Twitter account sent out a photo of a woman in a head scarf crying. It was captioned, "We made history."
Unfortunately, the woman in the photograph, Nancy Allam, was crying because the man she supported, Sen. Bernie Sanders, lost.
So she set the record straight, tweeting out a photo of her and Sanders with the words "HFA (Hillary For America) guess you didn't get the memo #StillSanders."
Allam said she won't vote for Clinton and is "considering" third-party options like the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.
Sort of makes you think: If her people can't tweet a factual photo, how can we trust them with nuclear weapons?
Reaching out, Reagan-style
Melania Trump was accused of cribbing words from first lady Michelle Obama's speech when she introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention last month, but Michael Reagan, son of 40th president Ronald Reagan, said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used his father's words in her acceptance speech last week.
"America is great," she said, "because America is good." She was trying to contrast the statement with Donald Trump's slogan of "Make America great again."
Reagan said his father used the line in a 1982 speech. However, Clinton did not attribute it.
"She was trying to reel them in," he said, "and she was trying to reel other groups in other parts of her speech during the course of the evening.
"It was aimed at Republicans: Give them something they recognize - Reaganesque-type moments - and that was the only point of her speech."
Reagan said she was making a play to the same type of voters as the Reagan Democrats, who helped elect his father twice. Many of those voters, now Republicans, haven't exactly been happy with the way the country's been governed the last seven and a half years.
Voice in the wilderness
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said all the right words to the pro-life Democrats for Life of America group, but his position is so far from that of the Democratic Party that he can't see them with a telescope.
Edwards received the group's Governor Casey Whole Life Leadership Award at an event near the party's convention in Philadelphia last week, but you can be sure it wasn't too near. The party, after all, calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion, and supports abortion provider and fetal tissue seller Planned Parenthood by name.
The governor, whose wife was advised to terminate her pregnancy when their unborn child was diagnosed with spina bifida, said "it was our faith, our belief, that God wanted us to have this child." The child, a daughter, is now 24, recently married and attends graduate school. "I cannot imagine life without her," he said.
Edwards said pro-life Democrats must continue to speak out because "it's hard to be a big-tent party if you've got a very small platform," but realistically added "It's going to be increasingly difficult [for pro-life Democrats] to navigate these waters if the party doesn't moderate on this issue."
With strong abortion supporter Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket, good luck on that.