What, now, is the Republican Party? Last night, in his most conventional moment to date, President Trump challenged the soul of the GOP. Based on applause, is it now safe to say the Republican Party stands for protectionism, a $1 trillion infrastructure project, paid family and medical leave, and governmental restrictions on drug prices and […]
Archives
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Is Trump Now the GOP?
01 Mar 2017
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The Examined Life–With Some Help
17 Feb 2017
Why do people still read Plato? Aristotle? The Bible? Augustine? Thomas Aquinas? John Locke? Immanuel Kant (well, maybe not so much)? What unifies them? It isn’t religion. Plato and Aristotle were most certainly not Christians. Augustine and Aquinas would have disagreed on the extent of man’s capacity to know and to will the good. The […]
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An Exile in Trumplandia and The Road to Serfdom
08 Feb 2017
Illiberal. That one word, expresses my primary fear about President Donald J Trump. Yesterday I posted An Exile in Trumplandia Discovers Twitter which I hope partially illustrates our president’s response to some of the institutional pushback he is seeing. When I use the word “liberal”, I am not using the word to mean government control, as “liberal” has […]
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Will Mr. Trump be the Squanderer-in-Chief?
02 Feb 2017
These are difficult days in the Trump administration. Really? Difficult days in only two weeks on the job? No Bereans were happy with Mr. Trump’s personal character, and no Bereans were happy with all of his policy prescriptions. Yet most of us believed that Mrs. Clinton was a worse evil, and all of us thought […]
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Executive Orders and “Extreme Vetting”
29 Jan 2017
President Trump issued a very broad executive order yesterday, banning immigration for up to 120 days, and including so-called “Green Card” holders, holders of permanent visas. This order was effective immediately and almost immediately protests erupted. Moreover, several Federal judges have issued temporary injunctions against the order’s application to certain individuals. Political types on roughly […]
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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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Trump, Truth, and the Fall of the Elites
11 Jan 2017
Reports surfaced last night that set the social media world on fire. Apparently, President Obama and President-Elect Trump were briefed on information obtained by a former British intelligence agent who put together a file of opposition research. The file and the information is not classified, nor is it the product of our intelligence agencies. The […]
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Arrival is the Best Film I’ve Seen This Year
26 Dec 2016
Director Dennis Villeneuve has crafted a masterpiece, a science fiction film that turns its gaze from the stars and into the corners of the human condition. Arrival deserves to stand alongside the best of the genre, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Interstellar, Contact, and Blade Runner. As I’ve written before, science fiction is at its […]
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Saudi America Wins! OPEC Waves the White Flag!
13 Dec 2016
One of the bright spots in the U.S. economy over the last decade was the incredible technology revolution in the energy sector with hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The U.S. energy revolution drove the nail through the heart of economic pessimists claiming that we’d hit “peak oil,” and were doomed to run out of cheap fossil […]
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Mr. Trump is not yet inaugurated, and he is already achieving notable policy success. This week’s decision by Carrier to keep 1000 jobs in Indiana rather than moving to Mexico is seen as a vindication against Mr. Obama’s “hand’s off” approach to job loss from globalization. In reality, Mr. Trump is repeating the same mistakes […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach