Joel Mathis

Well, that's it. Donald Trump is your presumptive GOP nominee for president . I do not think he will win the presidential election — but I don't take  his loss for granted. I'm more worried about a repeat of 1964. Barry Goldwater went down in flames. But his candidacy provided the platform for Ronald Reagan's political career. And the battle of 1964 was won, ultimately, in 1980. Does Trumpism have that kind of staying power? I suspect yes, but I'm a pessimist. If so, then, we who disagree with Trumpism have to work to defeat him this year — but his spiritual successors in years to come, as well. Will the battle of 2016 be decided in 2032? We should prepare for that possibility. One way to battle Trumpism: Acknowledge that some of Trumpism's underlying causes have merit. (Not all of them: The anti-Semites and racists are just evil people.) Those of us who have been nattering on about income inequality for years — well, this is a reason why . When people fi

Three thoughts about E.T., coming up after the trailer.... 1. My family watched E.T. tonight — for me, the first full sit-through since I originally saw the movie as a 9-year-old in 1982. Back then, popular movies stuck around in the theaters for a few months; they didn't do all their business the first week or two. So after months of increasing word-of-mouth, my parents took us to see. I remember crying when E.T. died and shouting with joy when the kids took off into the air on their bicycles. My 7-year-old son didn't get teary-eyed tonight. But the adults did. And when Elliott and ET took the air and sailed "across the moon," my boy did, in fact, shout out with delight. What can I say? It made me happy the movie can still connect, and it made me happy that my blockbuster-blitzed son isn't already jaded. 2. One thing Spielberg does in the movie is create the world as a children's world. Something I'd never noticed before: Except for Dee Wallace,

I actually enjoy Marvel on Netflix better than most of what the company brings to the big screen. So this piece at The Federalist caught my eye: The Punisher, who murders dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the second season of Netflix’s “Daredevil,” is actually the most moral character on the show.  Daredevil, who’s willing to break every law and ethical rule on the road to putting villains in useless prisons but unwilling to go any further, willingly participates in a vicious cycle that makes a mockery of justice. Allowing the revolving door of crime to continue ad infinitum is naive at best and immoral at worst. The Punisher realizes this and attempts to end the cycle instead. Through murder, of course. Now, we're talking about comic book characters here, so this probably isn't a topic worth dwelling on too long but a counterpoint is needed here. If your viewpoint is that there's good and evil and evil can only be overcome by being destroyed, maybe the wri

The New York Times observes that American productivity is stagnant, and considers three theories why. During the 2008 recession, labor productivity soared. Was this because employers laid off their least productive workers first? Because everybody worked harder, fearful for their jobs? Or was it a measurement problem as government statistics-takers struggled to capture fast-moving changes in the economy? We don’t know for sure. None of the Times' three theories use this armchair psychoanalysis to consider one obvious reason American workers aren't more productive these days: It isn't friggin' worth it. Since the end of the Great Recession, Americans have become more and more aware — aided by growing discussion of income inequality and movements like Occupy Wall Street — of two very salient points: • For decades, American productivity has soared. • During those same decades, worker wages have stagnated. Here's The Atlantic, reporting in February 2015 :

Good question. Easy answer. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I think we all remember how that worked out.

Gonna cast a ballot for Hillary, hope she defends the progressive gains of the last eight years, and pray she doesn't choose to needlessly invade a Middle Eastern country. It's a gamble.

Vox's explainer gets a little too cute today in discussing state-level LGBT laws: What if I told you Mississippi's law doesn't actually allow anything new? Now, the new law does technically allow discrimination against LGBTQ people: It lets bakery owners, for instance, cite religious beliefs to deny services to same-sex couples seeking to buy a wedding cake.  But even before the new law was passed, this type of anti-LGBTQ discrimination was entirely legal in the state, because neither Mississippi nor any municipality in the state included sexual orientation or gender identity in its nondiscrimination protections. So it was already legal for Mississippi businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people, whether they cited religious beliefs or just said they don't like gay or transgender people. This is both true — and good on Vox for helping readers understand that gays don't have protection in many places — but also kind of missing the point. No, gays didn'