Almost Classical

English: Number of self-identified Democrats vs. self-identified Republicans, per state, according to Gallup, January-June 2010 http://www.gallup.com/poll/141548/States-Competitive-Terms-Party-Identification.aspx. 18 point Democratic advantage 10-17 point Democratic advantage 3-9 point Democratic advantage 2 point Democratic advantage through 2 point Republican advantage 3-9 point Republican advantage 10-17 point Republican advantage 18+ point Republican advantage (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Best interview I've read on the Trump voters. Period. And the Slate reporter? Total jerk. Cannot stand the tone of the questions. I resent the tone. It is precisely why I am not and will never be a Democrat. The insulting, condescending, Thomas Frank "you're all idiots back home" rhetoric pushes me away from the "elites." The reporter? I dislike him more and more as the interview transcript progresses. A self-absorbed, self-righteous intellectual moron. I dislik...

Donald Trump in February 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You vowed to leave if Donald Trump won the White House. Leave. Please. Go. Be gone with you and all of your snobbery, your condescension, your identity politics. The rest of us have work to do! People from marginalized communities cannot pick up and leave the United States. And where would they go? Where would you go? France, where head coverings are banned? Germany, where anti-Semites are out in public again? Where is this mythical better place? A progressive friend posted that people struggling should move from places like Youngstown, Ohio, or rural West Virginia. Let me understand how that works. You have no money. You lost your job, might be on public assistance, have minimal technical skills.... Surely you can move to an expensive city with no problem. No. Most of us have to stick around. We have to gather up our resistance to a Pres. Trump and develop a more coherent strategy to salvange what moderates exist...

The following was posted to the comments section of a very old blog post: The Top Ten Reasons I Hate Capitalism: 10: Kim Kardashian 9: Vast economic inequality destroys democracy 8: Survival of the fittest (I'm definitely not among the fittest) 7: Donald Trump 6: The Attitude of the Fittest toward the Unfit 5: Reality TV 4: Walmart 3: Mark Zuckerberg 2: It appeals to the worst aspects of human nature And the #1 reason I hate capitalism: I am not Bill Gates! Envy! Perhaps that's what it comes down to. That's what the conservatives and defenders of Capitalism would have us believe. Or perhaps there is just something inherently unfair and unjust about it. Yes, it is easy to dislike some of the wealthy in our supposedly capitalist nation. And the easy response is that the United States is not a purely capitalist nation, certainly not as Adam Smith envisioned capitalism and not in the sense that the Austrian economists believed in and promoted either a minima...

There have been a great many blog posts and columns written since President Obama spoke on July 13, 2012. Many of his defenders have tried to "correct" any confusion about what his words meant, arguing that his statements were misinterpreted by the press and taken out of context by opponents. As Charles Krauthammer rhetorically asks, "Did the state make you great?" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-did-the-state-make-you-great/2012/07/19/gJQAbZOiwW_story.html The problem for Pres. Obama and his supporters is that his argument is deeply flawed. We do succeed with the help of friends, family, church, non-profit organizations, and, yes, government (generally of the local variety). But, many people have the exact same access to all these various supports… yet some succeed and some fail. Also, a simple point of fact: government is the people, not something outside and above the people. Without successful people paying taxes, there would b...

Paul Krugman, unfortunately, is the dominant voice among left-leaning economists. His columns are too often a sad example of what passes for great intellectual insight from the Coastal Elites in today's United States. Consider this series of logical leaps: Moochers Against Welfare   By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: February 16, 2012  [The] regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn't Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don't eat Thai food and don't rely on handouts? Krugman is a master of misleading arguments, resorting to a mix of straw man arguments and ad hominem insults that are meant to belittle conservative voters. Why the use of the word "moochers" for people on aid? If the goal is to make a point that people on aid are not  moochers, Krugman fails. Instead, his use comes across as insulting. A moocher...

If everyone earned no less than $30,000 and no more than $50,000 a year, we'd have far greater "mobility" between classes. So argues the chattering class, most of whom occupy the evil top one percent. No, that's not what they are saying and writing, but they are complaining that the United States has less social mobility than other nations. The problem? Those nations have less mobility because they have artificial floors and social limits on how far people can climb. To which nation was the U.S. compared by the New York Times? Denmark. American men born in the bottom quintile are more likely to stay there than the Danish, according to a study of earnings across generations. — http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/04/us/comparing-economic-mobility.html?ref=us Denmark? Compare education attainment. Compare the makeup of the society, including such factors as immigration and emigration. This is a strange comparison. Denmark, unlike the United States, is inc...

David Mamet is one of my favorite writers, in any form, and one of the three or four greatest American playwrights. I own several collections of essays by Mamet and already have The Secret Knowledge on my wish list. Glengarry Glen Ross stands alongside Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams' early works ( Plays 1937-1955 ) as reflections of our aspirations and our failings. If I could sit down and chat with any living writer about the craft, it would be Mamet. And he'd probably say something along the lines of: Tell a good story. That's why I like Mamet. He tells a good story, without pretense of "art" or blatant appeals to the "MFA elites" of the two coasts. Mamet's characters speak to the audience — and the audience is everyone. The characters speak in harsh, incomplete sentences peppered with profanity. His plays are a mix of passion, anger, and, sometimes, despair. Yet, they are also far enough from "reality...