Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie has a long interview with Brookings dude Jonathan Rauch, bearing the snappy title “The Case For Back-Room Deals, Party Hacks & Unlimited Money in Politics”, a thesis he spells out at greater length in his new book, bearing the somewhat less snappy title “Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money,…
Regressin’ to Jeb: the Renascence of the Republican Mean
The recent, entertaining demise of Scott Walker has caused many to embrace Marco Rubio as the once and future king of the Republican Party, something I’ve been known to do myself. Well, not so fast, conventional wisdom. Let’s step back and take a serious look at the tea leaves. It seems that Donald Trump, while…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here “What do you mean you’re out of goldfish? I crawled twelve fucking blocks and you’re fucking out of fucking goldfish? Jesus fucking Christ!” “No Happy Hour? I am so out of here!” “Two Cosmos, please. On a second thought, make it three.” “You drained my life’s blood, Louie, so you may as…
Ronald Reagan and Abortion
Now that Carly Fiorina is waving the bloody video clip in lieu of actually taking a position on abortion, I’m tempted to go back 48 years to the time in 1967 when Ronald Reagan, governor’s of the nation’s largest state, signed the nation’s most permissive abortion law. Two years ago, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who…
“He kept us safe.” Except for the 2,700 on 9/11, and the 5,000 poor shmucks in Iraq
Thus Jeb Bush, still the odds-makers favorite to win the Republican nomination. What fools these mortals be!
The Hillary Clinton email non-scandal scandal: It’s worse than a crime, it’s a whole nother blunder
Over at Reason, Peter Suderman has a take on the Hillary Clinton email thing, coming to the totally unremarkable conclusion that “Hillary’s problem is not so much the email story itself, but how she’s handled it,” which is a way of (silently) acknowledging that the “scandal”, as Pete constantly refers to it, isn’t a scandal…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here “Can’t we come up with something with a little more depth than ‘Rough day at the office, hunbun?’“ “You should have heard the crowd when I ran him over. Like I’m the bad guy!” “I get to keep the swords! Can you beat it? That’s my reward! I get to keep the…
Hank Jones, Joe Lovano: “Monk’s Mood”
Truck drivers wanted! Must be willing to work for less than they’re worth!
America needs truck drivers! We’re about 25,000 short right now, and we’ll need hundreds of thousands of them in the future, according to Bloomberg Business. But where are they? Well, they’re all over the place, but they aren’t willing to spend their lives on the road working for about $38,000 a year. If that’s the…
The Republican Civil Wars
Over at Reason, Matt Welch is keeping watch over the continuing Republican kerfuffle/steel cage death match being waged by the Trumpians and the Republican Establishment. Matt found a particularly piquant angle, noting the rage with which the National Review has been treating Trump in recent days, after, well, after saying what great ideas he has…