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Republicans seem intent on destroying the Republic

Let's be clear, there's a straight line between this : In a vintage return to his confrontational style, Sen. Ted Cruz indicated that Republicans could seek to block a Democratic president from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat indefinitely. And this : Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton , which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.”  “People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.”  “If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” The connecting line: Conservatives have spent a generation arguing that Democratic governance isn't just wrong, but illegitimate. (Thus the Clinton impeachment, thus birtherism, etc.) If Democratic governance is illegitima

The difference between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: (Or, compartmentalization is a good thing)

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Conservative thinker Hadley Arkes doesn’t understand why #NeverTrump Republicans can’t just get on the bandwagon already. Don’t they know what’s at stake? I can hardly blame the Bushes for recoiling from the indignities and insults, the lies and calumnies, thrown off with such abandon by Donald Trump. But accomplished public men are even more obliged than the rest of us to respect the difference, searing at times, between personal wounds and public duties. To take those duties seriously is to raise the question of why the Bushes and people like them do not care as much for the things that other Republicans, ordinary folk, see at stake in 2016: the prospect that medical care will be politically managed at the national level, with an independent commission rationing care, bringing everyone under their control; the specter of federal courts filled at all levels with the professoriate of the Left, ready to install as law those fevered theories that have now become the fas

Why this crapbomb of an election might be a good thing for America* (*Maybe.)

Here's one reason why voters might think elections are rigged.

Republicans have spent years convincing voters elections are rigged. Now it's coming back to bite them.

What we can learn from former racist Derek Black

I predicted Glenn Beck's conversion!

Paul Krugman's dumb idea: Sexual predators are Republican

Hillary Clinton's debate problem: She's a woman named Hillary Clinton

I'm seeing friends, right and left, suggest that Hillary Clinton failed to land a knockout blow against Donald Trump in tonight's debate. I'm not so worried: I think Clinton knows, after Friday's release of the "Billy Bush" tape, that she's ahead on points, and she doesn't have to work too aggressively to win the championship. Here's the problem: She's a woman named Hillary Clinton. This is the woman who commentators tell to smile more one debate, smile less then next. She's a woman who faces the same issue many professional women do — act too aggressively and you're a bitch. Moderate your presentation and you come across as a shrinking violet. No woman can win by those standards — indeed, they're not supposed to. Hillary, after decades in the public eye, is ultra-aware of the dynamic. So: If she presses the case too hard against Trump tonight, there's an excellent chance that lots of post-debate pundits are using b-word e

Teaching our sons not to be Donald Trump

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This is the Facebook status of a friend. I'm so angry on her behalf that I can barely hold back the tears. I've just had a conversation with my son. He's a good kid. But he lives in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world. We told him Never touch a girl or woman without her permission. Never call her names. Never act disrespectfully in any way to a girl or woman. There will be times when it might seem like the fun thing to do. When you see other boys acting that way. That doesn't make it right. There will be peer pressure. Resist. And talk to us, if you will. I realize that there's only so much we can do. He spends so much time in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world already without us. So it's imperative that we use the remaining time to affirm, and reaffirm, and reaffirm again, what those values are. Look at Donald Trump, son. Do the exact opposite.

I am Billy Bush

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By now, you've probably heard of Donald Trump's horrific recorded comments from 2005 about how he treats women. It's hard to see how he survives this and gets elected, but this is a weird and stupid election season: Never say never. What interests me in the recording, though, is the acquiescence of Billy Bush, who just goes with the flow as Trump describes his interaction with women in ever-more-disgusting terms: “And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”  “Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s. Trump today described the comments as "locker room banter." It's been a few decades since I spent regular time in a locker room, and I remember it could get rowdy and bawdy — but Trump's recorded comments exceed anything in my memory. Still, I'm now racking my brain. Am I Billy Bush? Have I sat by, maybe even chuckled, as a man — thinking he was speaking among men — spoke of a women o

In (sort of) defense of Donald Trump's comments about vets and suicide

This Donald Trump comment is making a lot of people mad today — the insinuation that vets who commit suicide are "weak." ABC: "When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it," Trump said, speaking Monday morning at a panel for the Retired American Warriors PAC in Virginia. Sounds pretty bad, right? Well, ABC at least includes the rest of the quote — which is omitted from a lot of media accounts. "We need mental health and medical, and it's one of the things that is least addressed and one of the things — one of the things that I hear most about when I go around and talk to the veterans," he said. "So we are going to have a very robust, very, very robust level of performance having to do with mental health." Now: I'm not one to defend Donald Trump. But in this case

What's so bad about Obama?

Reading the pro-Trump website American Greatness, I come across this comment from Seth Leibsohn: "There is all the justification in the world for conservatives, Republicans, Independents, and disaffected Democrats to support their one and last chance to stop an experiment in leftism that will rival in power and duration the New Deal and the Great Society." Which made me wonder: What's been so awful about the last eight years? Or, to put it another way: Are you better off than you were four years ago? I'm not a fool: Obama's presidency began in the middle of the Great Recession and America has been somewhat slow to claw its way out of what once looked like a civilization-ending financial disaster. So your life might not be as grand as before the housing bubble burst, but then again — that happened before his watch. Me? It's an iffy question, but I work in a journalism industry that's undergoing generational changes that would be happening no matter w

What liberals can learn from conservatives, revisited

A few years ago, I wrote a short column for the Philly Mag website trying to distill what I'd learned from years of close interaction with conservative friends like Ben Boychuk, William Voegeli, and Steve Hayward — three strong ideas of conservatism that, perhaps, liberalism doesn't always get well. Do the lessons hold up in the age of Trumpism? Let's revisit. • They’re often better at recognizing the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, the attempt to fix a problem can sometimes end up creating new, unanticipated problems that also need solving. You can, for example, make the case that the federal government’s decision to seriously start fighting wildfires in the last century actually ended up making wildfires … worse. In Boulder, Colo., attempts to rein in that city’s runaway growth have driven housing prices skyward —ruining some of the grassroots charm activists there were trying to preserve. Conservatives aren’t perfect at applying this principle—see the in

The endless rage of the Donald Trump election

Probably this is too personal, too emo, too revelatory, but here we go: I'm pissed. All the time. If you're paying close attention to the election, I suspect you are also pissed all the time. But maybe you're not. It's clear, though, a lot of people are pissed all the time. Now: Some of this is almost certainly fair. Donald Trump keeps finding new ways to demonstrate he'd be a very poor president. Possibly disastrous. It's rage-inducing to see smart people make implausible arguments for him, or — worse in my view — pretend his candidacy isn't the vehicle for the new ascendancy of white-nationalist anti-semitism it clearly is. The problem is this: I don't trust my rage. I don't trust it to help me make sound judgments. I don't trust it to help me deal with people fairly. I don't trust it to help me preserve friendships that I want to last beyond this stupid, stupid election. On the other hand, I'm also worried that in my ca

How to completely destroy Nebraska football in four easy steps.*

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1. Be a nearly all-white state. 2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive. 3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players. 4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in! * Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

George RR Martin predicted the end of football ... back in 1975.

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I was trying to remember this afternoon, a story I read in sixth-grade English about how professional sports had declined because people had come to enjoy video simulations of them much more. It struck me as possibly prescient, so I plunged into Google. Turns out the story, " The Last Superbowl, " was written by none other than George RR Martin. * The story is actually two tales, as he covers the last Superbowl which takes place in January 2016 and interjects the depiction of that Superbowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Hoboken Jets, and the downfall of real sports. Real sports, in the 2016 of Martin’s fictional world, have been overtaken in popularity by simulated sports.  Simulated sports are controlled by a computer that can put any team, from any era, against any other for the enjoyment of the spectators. The technology he describes in the computers that control the simulated sports may have been a thing of science fiction in 1974, when I assume he wrot

Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

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The conventional wisdom so far is that Hillary Clinton is so personally unpopular that she might be the only Democratic candidate that could lose the presidential race to Donald Trump. I have an alternative theory. Hillary's the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump, at least this year. Donald has turned all the subtext of politics into text, and thus — in the primaries, at least — all but turned the campaign into a dick-measuring contest: He beat his GOP opponents mostly by displays of dominance: "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "No Energy Jeb." The TV news coverage looked less like a campaign and more like nature documentary footage of wild predators establishing a clan's alpha male. Watching Hillary play rope-a-dope tonight — baiting Donald, then watch him bluster and interrupt while she smiled calmly — it occurred to me she's not playing the dick-measuring game. She was content to poke him, then step back and let him re

Let's turn the news into a public utility. Let the BBC be our model.

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Another shitty day for local journalism: I mean, damnit. We're left with a couple of conclusions: • The business model for local newspapers has utterly failed. • The mission of local newspapers is needed, desperately. So I make a proposal — one I don't think will find much support in a nation used to thinking of "news" as a "business," but one that recognizes that knowing what's going on is vital to our civic health. It's time to make the news a utility. I thought for awhile that the model for this should be public radio, with its funding reliant on donors, grants, and some public backing. But I don't think that'll do that trick. Instead, my model is the BBC, where anybody who uses a TV is required to hold a "TV license" that pays the television, radio and online services of the BBC . Every city, I now believe, should charge a similar licensing fee and use it to create an online news service to serve the local pop

Evening Walk: Venus

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Walking in my neighborhood, after dark. It's not lit as well as my old Philadelphia city block — I probably need to buy reflective shoes or something. The app on my phone tells me I have 2,000 steps to go to make my daily goal, so I keep walking, keep walking, keep walking past my house and my path occasionally lit by the occasional street lamp. Holst's "Venus: Bringer of Peace" is on my headphones. Above, through breaks in the clouds, I can see a star or two — the benefit of reduced light pollution. The darkness and the music go together; I feel like I'm creating or experiencing my own private segment of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" as I move through the neighborhood. For a moment, the real world and the digital world playing in my head merge. Everything flows. And then the music ends.