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Category Archives: Political issues

The media are blowing it again

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

It was of course a given that yesterday’s indictment of Donald Trump would be a media circus. The media are addicted to Trump, not because Trump matters anymore (he doesn’t; he’s ruined) but because of the spectacle that Trump has always created as a way of seducing and using the media. Truth is, the media […]

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Slowly, reality returns

Friday, March 31, 2023

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Many news outlets are reporting this morning that MAGA-world is freaking out about Trump’s indictment. Are they? I don’t see much sign of that. It looks to me to be just the usual theater in which the usual passengers in the MAGA clown car perform in front of the cameras for “the […]

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Justice as spite

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Source: Wikimedia Commons Paul Waldman has an important column this week at the Washington Post. It’s “On student loans, conservatives turn ‘fairness’ upside down.” Waldman writes: “The justices sounded almost as though they were advocating a strict version of communism, under which no one should receive any government benefit that isn’t given to everyone. You […]

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I’m rooting for Oxford, not for the cars

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Bicycles at Oxford. Source: Wikimedia Commons. A third of the people of Oxford don’t have cars. Slate Magazine has an excellent piece this morning on the town of Oxford’s plan to stop cars from overwhelming its medieval streets: How One City’s Traffic Plan Kicked Off a Global Right-Wing Freakout. The problem that Oxford is trying […]

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Pearls before swine

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Credit: CSpan When in the same room as the abundant kindness and goodness of President Joe Biden, how can Republicans even stand themselves? I’ll answer my own question. Many Republicans are so far gone that they can’t even know what they are. I did not watch Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican rebuttal. But according to Heather […]

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The tip of another iceberg

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Source: Wikimedia Commons The media are underplaying yesterday’s arrest of Charles McGonigal, former head of counterintelligence in the New York field office of the FBI. Here is the Washington Post story: Former FBI official accused of working for Russian he investigated Even though we still know very little, despite the Mueller report, about Russian interference […]

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Don’t we have heretics anymore?

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 2022. 546 pages. I almost never read bestsellers, and this book reminded me why. This book makes me want to go read some Jordan Peterson or something to wash the politically correct taste out of my mouth. […]

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200 years of conservative derp

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Corey Robin. Oxford University Press, second edition, 2018. The last chapter of this book — written, I believe, in 2017 — is about Donald Trump. Corey Robin quotes Tony Schwartz, who was the ghostwriter for Trump’s The Art of the Deal: “I put lipstick on […]

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Trump has no future other than prison

Thursday, November 24, 2022

A Facebook meme Polls from Quinnipiac University I always take with a grain of salt. And, actually, any single poll always should be taken with a grain of salt. But this particular Quinnipiac poll is so lopsided that I think it’s worth our confidence. The poll, released November 22, found that only 35 percent of […]

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The Trump show’s last season, canceled for bad ratings

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Source: Wikimedia Commons Is the Trump nightmare over? I would say no, not quite. There’s more craziness where that came from in the packed clown car of Trump wannabes and QAnon whack jobs. But I would argue that, now that the 2022 midterm election is over, we’ll be watching Trump through the rearview mirror. He’ll […]

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