October 9, 2020

What’s The Deal With Trump Followers?

Five years ago when Donald Trump rode that escalator and announced his candidacy, everyone including most people who are now Trump-for-lifers, believed it was a stunt, and he was clearly unqualified. In the subsequent year-and-a-half of the campaign, one-by-one candidates dropped until one candidate remained, The Donald. Along the way, he gained a loyal following, and in the final months of the 2016 election, even many Republicans who previously mocked him were now onboard, even some people who proclaimed themselves to be “Never Trumpers.”

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March 24, 2017

Constitutional Originalism’s Conceited Intent

It is an audacious pursuit to divine an assertive original context from a text written by men who themselves did not agree. Such is the conceit of constitutional originalism and it’s disciples. Even a modest history lesson divulges the disagreements among the founders — whether a Bill of Rights should exist, or even if there ought to be a constitution at all.

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March 16, 2017

Russian Election-Hacking Bingo, Conspiracies For Liberals

With giddy pride, liberals have deservedly vilified an expansive sea of right-wing conspiracy theories. But it now appears those seditious chickens have come home to a roost of left-wing treachery. Modern liberalism has become a hospitable nesting place for paranoia in the months since President Donald Trump’s election. With vociferous oratory growing in the weeks after his inauguration, left-wing talk show hosts and liberal pundits have stoked the base to a level of conspiratorial thinking previously thought reserved for conservative talk radio.

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March 11, 2017

Don’t Force ‘Sanctuary Cities’ To Do Fed’s Job

Conservative commentators characterize sanctuary cities as legal apostates, but the principles in practice in sanctuary cities share little with that description. It’s the latest example of the Right’s inability to parse the weeds of reality, seeking to find comforting answers attuned to black and white and good vs. evil.

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March 10, 2017

With ‘Fatal Conceit,’ Speaker Paul Ryan Fails Insurance 101

It appears Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is deeply disturbed that insurance premiums paid by healthy people help offset the insurance costs of people who are sick. But that is exactly how health insurance works. In fact, it’s how all insurance works. It’s called spreading the risk. In any insurance pot, there is a minority segment who are higher risk, and these higher risk individuals rightfully pay higher premiums. But in addition to those high-risk premiums, the low-risk majority chips-in to cover the greater cost outlay to insure the high-risk minority.

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March 8, 2017

Republicans Cannot ‘Solve’ Health Care In Good Faith

Fiscal conservatism defines nearly all Republicans, even if decades of failed economic promises say otherwise, but the modern Republican Party is also a collective of combative factions. There are extreme social conservatives who often vote based on social wedge issues like abortion. There are moderate social conservatives who tend to go along with many social conservative positions, but who are primarily fiscal hawks. And there are extreme fiscal hawks who lean libertarian, and in many cases reject some of the more offensive tenets of social conservatism.

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March 7, 2017

Wiretapping Trump’s Reality Detachment, One Tweet At A Time

In a series of reckless tweets over the weekend, President Trump accused President Obama of tapping his phone at Trump Tower. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy,” said Trump via his favorite form of communication. Of course Trump offered no evidence, and worse, it seems he received the “intel” from Breitbart News and the cranial hemorrhage conservative radio host, Mark Levin.

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