Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com. I have to begin this week’s mailbag by noting that there seems to a state of flux surrounding the official description of this […]
Archives
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The Mailbag! – Vol. 2
05 Nov 2018
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Mid-term elections are typically rough for the President’s party. Below are some figures that simply lay out results in mid-terms between 1946 and 2014. The first figure looks at results in the U.S. House. Some things jump out quickly. There is a significant amount of variability, but nearly all of it is in negative territory. […]
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Who shall return us to sanity? Name your pick for Republican challenger to Mr. Trump in 2020
22 Mar 2018
Mr. Trump unsurprisingly has defied convention and already declared himself a candidate for 2020, even before the 2018 elections. No other politician is likely to declare prior to the 2018 election, and the Republican party has no interest in a feud with the current president prior to the election–the Republicans want to be as unified […]
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Michael Kruse, of Politico, has written a fascinating piece on rural Democrats in the Midwest. He spoke at length with Terry Goodin, the only Democrat to represent a rural state legislative district in Indiana. Goodin is pro-life, an A+ legislator according to the National Rifle Association, and voted for an amendment to eliminate same-sex marriage […]
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The “Better Deal” is Another Raw Deal
28 Jul 2017
The Democratic Party, recognizing that it has lost touch with many of its former constituents, rolled out its “Better Deal” this week in Virginia. We have now had Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” Franklin Roosevelt’s more famous (or infamous) “New Deal,” Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal,” and now the latest “deal” for the American people. All of […]
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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
20 Jul 2017
How has US culture become so coarse, so quickly? I subscribe to an email list from the White House “1600 Daily”. I periodically receive news alerts and “what is going on” messages from the Administration. At 9:01 am eastern on 7/20/17 I received an email that said: Yesterday, I met with Republican Senators at the White House […]
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An Exile in Trumplandia Discovers Twitter
07 Feb 2017
I have been fairly adept avoiding social media so far. Over a decade ago I experimented with Facebook for a very short while, soon deciding that Facebook simply took up too much time. When we joined a house church in the early part of this decade I revived my Facebook account in order to read […]
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The Trump(et) Sounds
21 Jan 2017
Well, Donald Trump is now officially our president. He delivered an interesting and a bit controversial inaugural speech yesterday, which I would like to try my hand at analyzing. Before I do, may I mention others’ comments on it. George Will called it “a most dreadful inaugural address” (National Review Online, January 21, 2017) and […]
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Non-Fake Update on Fake News
13 Dec 2016
This is getting a bit confusing. Now we see fake news writers excoriating what they call fake news. Moreover, we now have a battle of alleged fake news going. In the past few days the allegation that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee website has been a major theme of the Left in DC. […]
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The Alt-Right: What is it and does it exist?
16 Nov 2016
The latest term to be coined by political pundits and liberals as well as conservatives of various stripes is “alt-right.” I have had a short back-and-forth conversation with some of my Bereans colleagues and read a few articles on this phenomenon. Well, guess what, I can’t find agreement on it. Is it a “real” phenomenon […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach