No, Google is Not a Monopoly
By Thomas L. Knapp On October 20, the US Department of Justice — joined by 11 Republican state attorneys general — filed a civil lawsuit against Google, with the stated goal of stopping it from “unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.” The lawsuit is […]
America in Transition: Two Things Donald Trump Can Do to Burnish His Legacy
by Thomas L. Knapp This column assumes that Joe Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election. While that SEEMS like a safe assumption — it would take successful legal challenges in several states to change the outcome — it IS an assumption. I could be writing for naught. But if Joe Biden […]
Why “Preference” is a Dirty Word to the New Puritans
By Thomas L. Knapp “I do want to be clear,” Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said during her Senate confirmation hearing, “that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.” A laudable stand, one might think. But some don’t. […]
A Lot More People Elected Jack Dorsey Than Elected Ted Cruz
By Thomas L. Knapp “[W]ho the hell elected you,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at an October 28 Commerce Committee hearing, “and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” Cruz was exercised over Twitter’s […]
Trump’s October Fizzle: A Difference Which Makes No Difference
By Thomas L. Knapp When the New York Post began rolling out a series of stories on Hunter Biden’s supposed laptop and its supposed contents, I immediately thought of Stormy Daniels and the “hush money” incident. “Everyone who cared about Donald Trump’s marital infidelities and sexual peccadilloes,” I wrote at the time, “already […]
Election 2020: The Up Side of Undivided Government
By Thomas L. Knapp As of late October, the political modelers at FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 72% chance of pulling off the trifecta — winning the White House and majorities in both Houses of Congress — on November 3. My visceral response to that possibility is negative. Excluding outlier possibilities like a Libertarian […]
In Five States, the Presidential Race Isn’t the Most Important Thing on the Ballot
By Thomas L. Knapp Yes, everyone’s caught up in the question of who will win the presidential election next week. Yes, everyone wants to know whether the Democrats will seize control of the US Senate. But those are “horse race” questions, and none of the likely outcomes are, in themselves, likely to result […]
Tucker Carlson and the Cult of the Court
By Thomas L. Knapp “The Supreme Court,” said Tucker Carlson on the October 12 edition of his Fox talk show, “exists only to determine whether the laws that our politicians write are consistent with the Constitution of the United States. That’s why we have a Supreme Court. It’s the only reason we have […]
COVID-19: Two Things About “The Science”
by Thomas L Knapp On October 4, three scientists published “The Great Barrington Declaration,” a statement named for the Massachusetts town in which they met. Infectious disease epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School […]
Is Home Ownership Really the “American Dream?”
By Thomas L.Knapp In 2016, then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump bemoaned the “lowest [US home ownership] rate in 51 years,” promising that “WE will bring back the ‘American Dream!’” In a 2019 “Memorandum on Federal Housing Finance Reform,” now-President Trump called on federal agencies to “make sustainable home ownership for American families our benchmark of […]
