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Monthly Archives: May 2018

Happy Birthday to a neologism

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Little notice. Today is the first birthday of “covfefe”; still awaiting a definition.

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A quick rant

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

In typical fashion, the genius responded to the Roseannecontroversy by complainingabout how horribly he is treated by the media. You know, what with some of them actually reporting the truth about him, even though they still can’t bring themselves to use the word “lie” when talking about his lies. One thing the media is not doing, is […]

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Book Report

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

I just finished Stephen Greenblatt’s latest book, Tyrant, Shakespeare on Politics. I’ve read a number of his books, but this one was by far the most enjoyable. Greenblatt never mentions the very stable genius, even in the Acknowledgments, where he recalls the book’s genesis when “not so very long ago…I sat in a verdant garden in […]

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The Gilded Age, a coda

Monday, May 28, 2018

I said I’d written my last post on this subject, but that was yesterday, and I just came across this. A week ago I subscribed to Foreign Affairs, since I got a deal for $20.00 a year. The most recent issue asks the question: Can Democracy be Saved? Here’s the opening paragraph from the first article, by […]

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Defining our terms

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Maggie Haberman is getting a bit of blowback in the twittersphere for her failure to call a lie a lie. You can pick up on the conversation here: http://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1000755597283905537 Her point, if you can call it that, is that if Trump chooses to believe something he spews, it is not necessarily a lie. It seems […]

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A final lesson from the Gilded Age

Sunday, May 27, 2018

One more lesson from the Gilded Age, and, since I’ve now finished Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands, this will be the last.  This is not so much a parallel to our own age, but a warning of what we may have to come, assuming we survive the present state of affairs. Toward the […]

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 25, 2018

Carol King and James Taylor

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Something fishy here

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A few days ago I drafted a post, but I ultimately decided not to post it, due to the fact that the point I was trying to assert, that Elliot Broidy had been handsomely paid for taking the fall for Trump’s affair with yet another Playboy bunny, which affair had led to an abortion. Here’s […]

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More echoes of the Gilded Age

Thursday, May 24, 2018

I continue to plow through Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. Here’s yet another way in which that age paralleled our own. First, it goes without saying that income inequality was as much of a problem then as it is now. At the time, as now, American productive capacity exceeded consumption. Americans did not […]

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An eternal question

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Why do the cable news networks (and I’m not talking about Fox, where it’s a given) constantly give airtime to the most insane members of Congress? Even when the interviewer pushes back, the mere fact that they put these people on television validates their mendacity. There are sane members of Congress. There are probably even Republicans […]

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