Over the past two months I’ve read countless articles on the GOP “panic” over the candidacy of Donald Trump.  It goes like this: Trump’s appeal to the base is overwhelming, but if he actually gets the nomination he’ll make a mockery of the party in the general election and basically hand a win to Hillary. […]

I have a theory on scandal-ridden politicians: If you’ve weathered enough political scandals the American public eventually becomes numb and stops caring about what you’ve been accused of; everyone gets comfortable with the idea that you’re just the sort of person who will always be embroiled in this or that malfeasance; effectively, you become scandal-proof. […]

From The Atlantic: On Thursday, Yahoo News published an interview in which Trump seemed to assent to reporter Hunter Walker’s suggestions of requiring Muslims to register in a database or giving them a form of special identification attached to their religion. Walker wrote, “He wouldn’t rule it out.” Trump’s own comments were much vaguer: “We’re […]

It’s not me saying it, it’s The Atlantic: Mickes’s study revealed another interesting difference: Men wrote some of the best jokes, but they also used more profanity and sexual humor, and those jokes weren’t rated very funny. If men were truly the funnier sex, though, wouldn’t they be more consistently funny? In a later experiment, […]

If you ask a loyal member of either end of the political spectrum to discuss which side of the debate has done more to assault and erode Freedom of Speech in America, they will always blame their opposition.  Liberals often point to efforts by moral or religious groups like the PMRC, which sought to suppress […]

Sorry for the vulgarity, but I couldn’t think of a better way to say it. From NPR’s coverage: The group’s self-declared caliphate includes larges swaths of eastern Syria and western Iraq and ISIS effectively serves as a government, running the courts and the schools, collecting taxes and the trash. Yet over the past two weeks, […]

An excerpt from a terribly-titled essay, “Why GOP elites are totally ignoring a political reality that could destroy their party”: And yet, in all polls, and for weeks on end, Carson and Trump each individually lead all the candidates in the politicians’ race. Together, these two outsiders attract 48 to 50 percent of poll respondents. Combined, […]

Breaking news from CNN: “Jihadi John,” whom Western officials have identified as Mohammed Emwazi, has appeared in a series of brutal execution videos, taunting Western leaders in a British accent. It was not immediately clear whether the strike was successful. But a senior U.S. official said authorities are confident that the strike killed Emwazi, adding […]

I typically don’t like to do two posts on the same subject in one day, but Johnathan Chait’s piece for NY Magazine really hits the nail on the head: Even if it were the case that political correctness was totally confined to campuses, it would not make the phenomenon unimportant. Colleges have disproportionate influence over […]

Marco Rubio got predictably big applause during last night’s debate for making the following [relatively meaningless] comment: “For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education.  Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” What the hell is Rubio talking about? First, I’m not sure what […]