A former mentor once explained to me why America would be better off if scientists ran the country. While technocracy isn’t inherently anti-democratic—America could simply elect scientists and engineers—the notion smacks of elitism. Of course, this country was founded on the idea of elitism. Only property-owning White men could vote. The president was appointed by […]
Yale Professor Timothy Snyder is an expert on the history of Eastern Europe, especially the histories of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and World War II. He has become a public intellectual with the publication of his books “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom.” Snyder has been sounding warnings about the second Trump Administration, not only for […]
In addition to being denied his debt ceiling extension, Trump was also repudiated when his daughter-in-law “withdrew” from consideration as Senator from Florida. Trump was pushing Lara Trump to fill the seat that will be vacated when Marco Rubio is approved as Secretary of State. Lara Trump’s appointment was intended as Trump domination: domination of […]
The US is one of a small handful of countries that has a statutory limit on the federal debt. It used to be routine for Congress to raise the debt ceiling, but recently, House Republicans have been using the debt ceiling to extract political concessions from Democratic Administrations. While raising the debt ceiling wasn’t in […]
Robert Kutner has a paywalled article in The New York Review of Books about the history of free trade and the efforts since Trump’s first term to impose tariffs, particularly on China, beginning with the first Trump Administration. “Free trade ideology once aligned with America’s economic and security interests. After World War II, open markets […]
Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse does readers a civic duty of offering up the New York Times article about Donald Trump being dangerous to the nation. Included in this article are Law Prof. Joyce Vance’s views on Trump and his actions. In which case, Angry Bear agrees with Civil Discourse. A good read. What is […]
According to yesterday’s navel-gazing piece in the Boston Globe*, “on-the-fence” voters are edging to supporting Trump because they feel looked down upon by Democrats. WTF? Do they seriously believe that Trump *doesn’t* look down on his supporters? It is blindingly obvious that the only person on the planet that Trump cares about is Donald Trump. […]
The alleged “appeal” of Ron DiSantis is that he’s “Trump without the baggage.” So why is DiSantis (and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other Trump imitators) doing so poorly? The answer is that the Trumpenproletariat *want* the Trump baggage. To them, that’s his appeal. The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan nailed this decades ago: the […]
Here we are in a presidential election year, and one of the two major party candidates certain to get the nomination is still claiming the last one was stolen from him. Now, he refers to the criminals who were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison over their Jan 6 crimes as “hostages.” When did the […]
“From his very first term, Bush shocked many by reaching who had either been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes during the Reagan and Bush administrations’ and others who many felt should have been indicted.“ “You have a very long list of people and what emerged through the two terms was that people who seemed […]