The Hall of Fire

I like a lot of pieces of Stranger Things, but I don't think they always go together into a cohesive whole. I call this the "X Files" effect, and a lot of shows with long arcs suffer from it to one extent or another. And I wish Winona Ryder was allowed more of an emotional range, which ev...

Let's not forget--in a lot of places, the chief duty of the police is generating revenue. They have to not only pay for themselves but underfunded municipal governments with constituents who either can't afford to pay more taxes (see: north St. Louis County, including Ferguson) or just don't want t...

Or just use one of the free plagiarism checkers online. But that would imply Mrs. Trump and the pal she got to redo the speech with her (after she decided the one the pros wrote for her wasn't "right") understood that plagiarism is a problem. It doesn't surprise me that at that level of e...

There is a story going round that between them they will make such a botch of the negotiations that May will be able to sack them both and not have to enact article 51

And then it turns out everyone loves "Springtime for Hitler."

Oh, I think it has, and will continue to have, a significant negative effect on her campaign, because it feeds this narrative that she is corrupt and untrustworthy. I think, like Benghazi, anything short of prosecution of one of the Clintons is lost in the scandal-tinged haze that being a Clinton c...

Please remember I was raised in a fundie, right-wing household, so I hear pretty much all the dog whistles there are. On a side note, one of the things I'm proudest of when it comes to my family is that they got demonstrably better over the years, as their innate decency slowly overcame the cultura...

My assumption concerning the tweet would be that it was a dog-whistle suggestion that Clinton is "owned" by "Jewish money" or some such, given some of the things Trump's people have said. There's clearly an anti-Semitic tinge to many of his supporters, almost unavoidable given t...

How likely does it seem that at some point the political system of the US could be reformed? I would put it at near zero. At least any time remotely soon. Especially because it wouldn't be reform so much as wholesale replacement. The point of the U.S. Constitution was explicitly to create an NON-pa...