“Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time. We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions.” Thus former House Speaker Paul Ryan on Donald Trump, in…
Search Results for: Tea Party
Kevin Costner’s “Highwaymen”: A plateful of fascism, racism on the side
Kevin Costner? Kevin “Dances With Wolves” Costner, who defended the Lakota against the genocidal white patriarchy? Kevin “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” Costner, who was, you know, the prince of thieves, and defied the, you know, genocidal white patriarchy? That Kevin Costner is a fascist? Damn straight, dude. Big Daddy Kev has had with these…
Ilhan Omar: The strange case of the little girl in the headscarf who noticed that the emperor has no clothes
Oh, Ilhan Omar, what have you done? Yes, speaking the truth in the halls of Congress has always been hazardous to your health, but when little Ilhan, newly elected representative for the fifth district of Minnesota (basically Minneapolis and environs), remarked that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says…
Nate Silver explains it all for me. Pretty much.
Before the 2016 election—before the death of reason—elections impresario and general numbers dude Nate Silver put together and posted on his fivethirtyeight website the video shown above, “Long Before Trump, There Was Ross Perot”. What was interesting to me was not so much Perot seen as a precursor to Herr Donald as the conviction expressed…
The dollar still sound as a dollar, studies show
If you search on the Internet for “Why the dollar will never collapse” or, conversely, “Why the dollar will collapse”, well, you’ll get a lot of hits. What you won’t find, unfortunately, is a piece I read in Bloomberg several weeks ago explaining, well, why the almighty dollar remains so goddamned almighty, and which I…
New York City to Amazon: Drop Dead
In a better universe than ours—there must be one—the provincial New York politicians and union leaders who cut off not their own noses but that of the city’s poor, and (to thoroughly manhandle the metaphor) not to spite their faces but to protect their power, would be punished—very indirectly—by a slow decline in the Great…
Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickle explain it all for you
Want a seriously detailed examination of the great role reversal in American politics, as the Democrats shifted from the party of segregation to the party of equal rights, losing the South but gaining its soul? Then check out “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered” by Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickle in Studies…
A Social Call
(Another short story in the manner of Rex Stout, featuring Nero Wolfe.) “I’m afraid that would be impossible.” “I agree entirely. And it’s been my experience that when things are impossible, they don’t happen. Which means that we should just forget about this.” She laughed. “But that would be impossible as well.” “I assure you…
Clint Eastwood’s “Mule”: Very Largely (Yet Not Entirely) Disappointing
When I saw the ads for Clint Eastwood’s possibly final film, The Mule, I was—rather shockingly, since I haven’t seen one of his films since In the Line of Fire (1993, and excellent)—intrigued. A gritty tale of shady, sleazy drug deals gone wrong, with the twist that the hapless protagonist caught in the middle is…
Catherine Rampell is confused. I enlighten her.
WashPost columnist Catherine Rampell—Princeton Phi Bet and winner of the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism—is struggling with the evidence: The real question is why congressional leaders, including [now former House Speaker Paul] Ryan,1 repeatedly cave to Trump’s latest tweets and fleeting fancies instead of writing him off as the flake that he is. Why…