In the nearly eight years I have been writing OpEdge, there are only two issues that have attracted large amounts of negative response on Twitter. By large, I mean more than 20 people making uncalled-for attacks on me, including at least one who bombards my Twitter account with a rapid-fire series of negative tweets, out […]
Reading E. J. Dionne Jr.’s Why the Right Went Wrong provides an illuminating contrast to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. Both cover the same history: the Republican Party and conservatism since the 1950s. But whereas Mayer focuses on the mechanisms by which economic and social right-wingers took over the Republican Party and drove public discourse to […]
I’m beginning to wonder if not being good at business math is a requirement for getting a regular column on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Time and time again, columnists use fallacious quantitative reasoning to build their case. Whether overestimating the impact of the minimum wage on overall employment, supporting the laughable […]
When I think of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I always imagine an enormous rock that weighs thousands of tons and symbolizes American society. Bernie and Hillary are charged with moving the rock one mile down the road. Hillary talks of using ropes, winches and pulleys and of humans working together to slowly move the […]
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money does a thorough job of dissecting the 40-year campaign of a small coterie of billionaires to change the American political agenda for their own selfish ends. She explains the process by which our country has reached the point at which it is overwhelmingly centrist-looking-left but controlled by right-wingers, especially at the […]
Last week, when I wrote that the transgendered should use the bathroom for the sex of their genitals, I was wrong. Two friends pointed out that a transsexual will often dress and look like the sex with which she/he identifies and to use the bathroom of the other sex would be disruptive. One friend rightfully […]
Like many people who don’t inhabit the alternative universe known as 21st century American conservatism, I have been cogitating a lot about why Donald Trump has sustained his popularity among those who affiliate with the Republican Party. After poring over a list of his stands on and approaches to the issues, his background, his attitudes […]
There are very few situations in public life in which the differences between males and females matter. In fact, I can only think of four: Only women can bear children. Men are faster and stronger than women, so we segregate the two sexes at the very highest levels of athletic competition. This segregation is not […]
That reality television flop Sarah Palin was endorsing reality television star Donald Trump for the office of president of the United States has been known since late August, when Mint Press covered it. The Mint Press story said that in return Trump might give Palin a cabinet-level position in his administration. Fortunately or unfortunately, a […]
In a self-righteously overwrought article that blames liberals for the lack of gun control laws, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof either makes a classic rhetorical mistake or employs a reliable propaganda trick: stating that just because two things happened at the same time, one caused the other. In algebraic terms, the flaw unfolds thusly: […]