If there were ever a time to "question authority," as the old counterculture slogan of the 1960s urged, the authoritarian age of COVID-19 is that time. 2020 will go down in American history as the year that public health "experts" got everything wrong.
Was 2020 the worst year ever? The media keep saying that.
We did have the pandemic, a bitter election, unemployment, riots and a soaring national debt.
Nearly everyone has seen the classic movie "The Shawshank Redemption." Well, it turns out there is a real life "Red" Redding, the character played by Morgan Freeman. He is in prison in Alabama. He has been there for nearly 40 years. He was guilty of his crime: a murder he committed as a teenager in a drug operation. But so many people who have interacted with Rutledge in prison see the similarities in character with Red.
Who could have predicted how dreadful a year 2020 would be.
The raging argument on the left between progressives who argue for radical change and centrists who advocate for incrementalism is hardly new. Nearly a century ago, progressive titan and Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt were often at loggerheads over the same question.
Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark in the night, so goes in politics: Uncharacteristic behavior can turn out to be crucially significant -- uncharacteristic behavior in politics being defined as one demographic group unexpectedly trending one way when most of the electorate trends the other.
Denouncing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill as a parsimonious "disgrace" and hinting at an Alamo-style finish on Jan. 6, when Congress votes to declare Joe Biden the next president, Donald Trump is not going to go quietly.
This country is not governed by a "Republican Party" and a "Democratic Party." It is governed by an establishment "uniparty" that betrays our citizens at every turn. Exhibit A: The joint annual ritual of fiscal vulgarity known as the omnibus spending bill.
Who should be on Santa's naughty and nice lists this Christmas?
*Naughty:
I'd give lumps of coal to:
Democrats and their liberal economic advisers obsess about income inequality. Will someone please tell them that no act in modern times has widened the gap between the rich and the poor more than the lockdowns going on right now?
If America were a company and not a country, we would have long ago dissolved the corporation, split the blanket, and gone our separate ways.
"In his first rally since losing the election last month, President Trump continued to spout conspiracy theories about voter fraud, falsely claiming that he had defeated President-elect Joe Biden." That was the lede of a news story in the Dec. 5 Washington Post.
Identity politics seems to be sticking around. Important election results seemed to refute the notion that Americans vote for their ethnic or racial identity. Hispanic voters trended significantly toward the supposedly anti-Hispanic Donald Trump, and Californians, while voting 63% for Joe Biden, rejected racial quotas and preferences in a referendum by an even larger margin than in the 1990s.
First, they came for the Confederates. And that purge is far from over.
— In a highly unusual situation, both of Georgia’s Senate seats will be on the ballot next month — one seat was already scheduled to be elected, while the other is a special election.
— As January’s result will decide control of the Senate, both sides are invested in Georgia’s outcome.
— In the regular election, Democrat Jon Ossoff made some gains in the suburbs since he was last on the ballot, but to beat Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), he’ll likely have to do even better.
— The battle for the state’s other seat is a bitter contest between appointed incumbent Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and a preacher.
— Though it would add an extra layer of chaos to the outcome, history — and data from November — seems to point away from a split outcome.
Here is a textbook illustration of how the corporate media's sins of omission can be far more damning than the corrupted industry's sins of commission.
President Donald Trump should pardon Edward Snowden.
When import tariffs are under discussion in Washington, D.C., they typically revolve around rates of 5% to 25% on foreign goods.
2020 will surely qualify as an "annus horribilis" in the history of the Republic.
By New Year's, one in every 1,000 Americans, 330,000, will be dead from the worst pandemic in 100 years. The U.S. economy will have sustained a blow to rival the worst year of the Great Depression.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis tailor-made for a xenophobe like Donald Trump. The coronavirus provided an ideal opportunity to turn the president's biggest liability -- the nativist bigotry that went so far as to lock children in cages and then lose hundreds of their parents, which elicited disgust even among some of his supporters -- into a strength in early 2020. Trump's explicable failure to knock this easy pitch out of the ballpark is my biggest explanation for why he lost the election to a singularly lackluster opponent.
