Yes, US Chief Justice John Roberts, who makes US Chief Justice Roger “Dred Scott Decision” Taney look like John Marshall (pretty much) has addressed a “warning” to Donald Trump (well, pretty much) not to defy the federal courts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary, to wit: Every Administration suffers defeats in…
Author: Alan Vanneman
To AOC or not to AOC? Tough question! Very tough!
Okay, I’m pretty late with this one—what else is new?—but the defeat of House Democrat liberal star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the position of ranking minority member on the House Oversight Committee by Illinois Democrat Gerry Connolly, despite the fact that, among other things, Gerry is both 74 and suffering from esophagus cancer, does seem to…
Donald Trump not a nice man, John Bolton discovers
No, Donald Trump is not a nice man, although it took his re-election for this utterly omnipresent fact to penetrate the hitherto impenetrable pate of one John Bolton. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, M. Moustache, America’s most compulsive interventionist, a man who once demanded that the U.S. invade Luxembourg (“and for keeps this time,…
The Curious Case of the Souring Centrists What’s the Deal with Nate n’ Damon?
Over at his substack blog, Notes from the Middleground, Damon Linker has a disturbing—though not in the way he imagines—post up, titled Dialectical Contributions to Democratic Breakdown, commenting on varieties of “bad news for democracies” from around the world—including South Korea, Romania, and, unfortunately, the U.S., which is, unsurprisingly enough, the only one I’m going…
The New York Times and Dan Drezner get all Jeff Bezos on your ass
That’s seems to be the motto at the Gray Lady these days, judging from a recent column by Tufts Professor Daniel Drezner, The Evolution of Marco Rubio, dispassionately describing the transformation of a standard-issue Republican hawk, Florida Sen. Mario Rubio, now “tabbed” to be Trump’s secretary of state, into a standard-issue MAGA clone, with a…
Literature R Us is moving to Substack!
Yes, I have joined the crowd. All previous posts—all 3,000 of ’em—will remain here and, for the sake of maintaining a complete record, I’ll also be posting the newbies here as well, or at least most of them. Enjoy!
Gaaaack!!!!! I can’t quit Amazon! We’re Partners!
It’s true! I can’t quit Trump boot/ass licker Jeff “Hey I’m only the second-richest man in the world” Bezos because I’m in business with him! Literally! A month or two I said I was splitzie with Jeff over his total trashing of what was left of always dubious journalistic integrity of the Bezos-owned Washington Post,…
Making a pact with the Devil has a downside, Republicans discover.
It’s “amusing”—I’m pretty sure that’s a smile (of sorts) on my face rather than a rictus of despair—watching Republican senators attempt to swallow their “pride” and pretend that Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Miami Matt Gaetz, aka “the Viceman”, is “appropriate”. The same may be said for Robert F. “Vaccine Man” Kennedy, and, well,…
Daron Acemoğlu is an idiot!
Sure, schooling Nobel Prize-winning Ph.D.s from the London Schol of Economics on the folly/hypocrisy of cherry-picking is an ugly job, but someone’s got to do it! And who better, really, than someone with a BA in English from Oberlin College? Yeah, ole Daron put his foot in it, all right, and I’m just the guy…
Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the truth prevail
On November 8, 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first triumph, I wrote “It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear.” Today, we are not so lucky. What I had to say in my earlier post, which bore the…