US Politics

More on the GHW Bush Legacy

I only touched on one strikingly negative aspect of the GHW Bush legacy in my last post, but this is a pretty good compendium of Bush’s offenses that I mostly agree with. The tone is relentlessly harsh and the numbers cited ...

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Remembering Willie Horton

The custom of saying only good things about the recently departed is well-established and mostly harmless in everyday life, but it should be rooted out of our public discourse. The death of a major political figure is and should be ...

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A Wave, not a Tsunami

Expectations were high, and so the disappointments were sharp. A tsunami would have put Gillum and Abrams in the Florida and Georgia statehouses; it would have saved US Senate seats for Missouri and Florida and flipped another in Arizona; it ...

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Asymmetric Craziness

Whenever I hear someone bemoaning the dangerous polarization of our politics, I unerringly point out that the polarization is asymmetric. The term “political polarization” suggests two political parties and their respective supporting networks moving away from the center in roughly ...

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Which Way for the Democrats? (III)

I expect I’ll be doing posts with this title for some time to come; we’ll see how large the Roman numeral gets. Hillary Clinton chimed in the other day on a “which way” issue; not right vs. left, but high ...

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What we need

I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground ...

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Collins’s Presumption

You don’t need me to add to the opprobrium that has been justly hurled at Susan Collins for her miserable performance in the Ford-Kavanaugh drama. I do, however, want to focus on one issue that Collins raised that has an ...

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Kavanaugh at War

I have no serious doubt that Christine Blasey Ford told the truth to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. But let’s be as charitable as we can to Brett Kavanaugh. It is conceivable, as I suggested parenthetically in an earlier post, ...

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Curious Kavanaugh

It hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it deserves, especially in light of recent developments.  I am therefore reproducing some excerpts from Brett Kavanaugh’s August 1998 memo to his boss, Kenneth Starr, suggesting questions to be posed to Bill ...

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He said….She said…

In the absence of witnesses willing to testify, it will probably be impossible to know with reasonable certainty who is telling the truth–Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford—about their alleged encounter 35 years ago. But there is a pretty straightforward ...

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