Back in the day, conservative health care maven Avik Roy put the wood to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement legislation, remarking after Paulie “improved” the bill to meet Republican criticism, “it’s curious that extending tax cuts was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable…
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Trump on Qatar: Let the ass-kicking begin!
The quasi-civil war within the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), pitting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against tiny but wealthy Qatar, has alarmed just about everyone in the “West”, with the single exception of President Donald Trump. The Donald has been tweeting enthusiatically that the collision between the…
David French, daring to speak the unspeakable, so to speak
“Make no mistake,” the National Review’s sometimes rational (but not this time) David French warns us in light of the recent Manchester bombing, “there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that a certain amount of terrorism is just the price we have to pay to live the way we want to live. Now, to be clear,…
Meaner than a snake and smarter than one too: Inside the mind of Mitch McConnell
I once called Mitch McConnell a “reptilian vote-counter”. Well, that insult still goes, because it’s true. Mitch can count votes, and here’s what he comes up with. The last time the Republican candidate for president won an “honest” majority was George H. W. Bush in 1998. And if George H. W. ran today, he’d get…
The New York Times, furiously beating the drums of war
Did you see video of that big military parade in North Korea last week? Those huge missile carriers, designed to hold an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S.? Did it ever occur to you that those carriers might be empty, that the parade was a huge bluff, that the North Koreans have never tested an…
A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017
(Author’s note: In the spring of 1996 I began to work as an editor/writer for a newly created non-profit called the “Education Statistics Services Institute,” whose sole function was to support the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education. I was assigned work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress,…
Why Did Hillary “Lose”?
The most important, and the ugliest, thing to happen in 2016 was the decision of 46 percent of the American electorate to vote for the worst major party presidential candidate in American history. The second most important was the decision of 48 percent to vote for Hillary Clinton. So why did Hillary “lose”? It is…
I predicted this!
Well, I did. A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post, “Why Donald Trump will be our very worst president, by a very wide margin”, and, one week in, it’s already true. For the past seven days, Donald Trump has been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, except, you know,…
Who are you calling a war criminal?
At yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State to be (or not) Rex Tillerson, Fla. Sen. Marco Rubio puffed out his young chest and demanded of Rex whether he considered Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” on the basis of recent bombing of civilians in Syria. Well, if you’re going to be secretary…
Hey, Netflix! “The Crown” sucks!
Is there anyone in the world so pathetic as Elizabeth II? Aside from us 300 million-odd schmucks who will soon be under the thumb of El Hugo Chávez del Norte. But, seriously, one has to feel sympathy for a ninety-year-old broad condemned to wander the earth pretending that she’s important. It wasn’t always that way,…