The German government confirmed that Trump offered German scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine $1 billion for exclusive rights for the vaccine to be used “only in the U.S.A.” The German government viewed the attempt as a hostile takeover of their pharmaceutical industry. There are so many things wrong with this, it’s hard to know …
I. Mail-in ballots There’s an easy solution to elections in the time of a virus outbreak: Mail in ballots. There is time for states to arrange for this by November. An advantage of federalism is that states can experiment and find procedures that work. Other states, then, can learn and borrow those procedures. Some states …
On Thursday night, Trump attacked Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities. He said “There’s something going on” and started listing instances in which Biden garbled words or said the wrong thing. On Saturday on Twitter, people started telling me that there was irrefutable evidence that Joe Biden was in cognitive decline. They told me that the evidence …
If you haven’t seen the new ad, it’s here: Spoiler: It’s all about race. It’s also about economics and power, but race underlies it all. Some background: Oligarchy isn’t new in the US. In fact, this is our third slide into oligarchy. Our first oligarchy was slavery: A few white men had disproportionate wealth and …
I tweeted this: Ken asked this: Spoiler: The antidote to cynicism is to hold on to your principles. So the way to respond to a cynical comment is by making a principled comment. First, a bit about cynicism and how it destroys democracy. Here Clint Watts explains that one goal of active measures is to …
I’ve been getting questions about Trump and coronavirus: I’ll offer a reason this is a big problem for Trump, aside from what we know about how this will affect the economy, and how failing economies sink incumbent presidents seeking reelection. Fascist leaders don’t know how to deal with a real crisis. A difference between real …
You can see that Tom Nichols, a Never-Trump former Republican, is trying to make sense of Democrats. He thinks it’s absurd that Bernie Sanders said his first item in the White House would be to legalize marijuana. Tom doesn’t understand that big tents get messy. Diverse coalitions are not efficient. People in the big messy …
Long time and regular readers of this blog: Please forgive a bit of repetition. Some things need to be said more than once. LeiliHana asked: Yesterday I talked about why the criminal justice system is inadequate to deal with our current crisis. LeiliHana (and others on Twitter) are asking why we can’t remove the lawbreakers …
Claudia felt bewildered when she read yesterday’s reports on how Trump tried (again) to prevent people from learning that the Russians were helping his campaign. Yes, we have a lawbreaking president. But that is only part of the problem. The other part is that the lawbreaking president is being shielded by a major political party, …
In Nov, Fiona Hill testified that Russia was gearing up to attack the 2020 election. Last spring Robert Mueller testified that the Russians were interfering “as we sit here.” Today we learned that Russia is backing Trump’s re-election—and Trump was furious lawmakers were briefed about it. Just yesterday, Asha Rangappa, Alex Finley, and John Sipher …
