Digital Edition, Vol. 266, No. 8; Dec. 31, 2021
December 31, 2021 — To download this issue of our paper, just click on the image at right.
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Understatement of the Century
Time Magazine’s “Man, Woman, Thing, or Random Editorial Notion of the Year” is a promotional stunt masquerading as a tradition. Every year, though, Americans* pay attention to it. Why? Ask Charlie Brown why he lands flat on his back every fall. This annual marketing ritual does have one saving grace: it reliably provokes the savage wit of our Starving Artiste. The magazine misfired badly by featuring a billionaire who wants to go to another planet without having understood this one. Mr. Dater, on the other hand, has once again pinpointed—or pen-pointed—the single most salient thing going on today. Our only quibble is that “…of the …
The Warped Politics of Inflation
by Thomas Meisenhelder The recurring mantra from Fox, the Republican Party and the mainstream media is that Joe Biden, government spending, and the rising incomes of ordinary people are responsible for our increasing inflation rate. That is incorrect and this error is preventing an effective national response to inflation. This misconception about inflation leads to policy errors similar to those made in response to the 2008 housing mortgage crisis and economic recession. Somehow the media and the politicians understood that crisis to be the result of unwise decisions by consumers and overly generous government housing policies. In other words, ordinary Americans were the problem. As …
The GOP Plan for America
To the Editor: Sit in on any high school debate class and you’ll quickly learn that using personal attack to undermine your opponent’s argument is catamount to admitting defeat. It’s considered the strategy of last resort and will cost you points every time. Thank goodness such academic nonsense doesn’t apply to the adult world of political discourse. If it did, those of us who favor democracy over autocracy might never learn that our belief makes us godless blood-sucking baby molesters who hate America! Absent a coherent party platform, the Republican vision for America’s future has two basic elements. First, they promise to reinstate a dangerously …
The War On Fox’s Fake Christmas Tree
To the Editors: What was the big kerfuffle over the “Christmas Tree” fire in front of the Fox building in New York all about? You would think, listening to Fox “News” personnel, that it was an apocalypse—a 36-hour, uninterrupted breaking-news event. But it was just a short, relatively small, confined blaze, set by a deranged arsonist, who perhaps had a dislike for a fake, wannabe-tree, erected instead of a real tree. After all, what burned was just a wire frame that had some greens and ornaments attached to it—not a real tree at all. If it had been a real tree, it would have been …
We Need the Build Back Better Bill
To the Editor: Given his troublesome vote, Senator Joe Manchin must want a Build Back Cheaper Bill. But that attitude fails because big problems demand big solutions. When our Revolutionary ancestors faced the world’s fiercest nation, they shouted, “Give me liberty or give me death,” not “Give me liberty unless it’s too pricy.” We would have failed to defeat the Nazi threat if we tried to fight on the cheap. War is costly but our ancestors faced a stark choice: pay now, or pay more later. They paid because they faced clear and present dangers. The price of victory is high, but the price of …