Democrats Pritzker in Illinois and McCaskill in Missouri have both taken the route of defensive political ads. I believe this is a big mistake, especially in Pritzker’s case. Nobody who isn’t a total egghead knows him. And then he goes on TV and opens with, “There have been articles saying that I’m an XYZ bad person who wants to do ABC bad things.” I, for one, have been unaware of such articles and would have remained blissfully ignorant of them had Pritzker not chosen to lay out money to inform me of them.

McCaskill does the same thing. “You’ve probably seen the ads accusing me of corruption. Factcheck.com says it’s not true and I’m not corrupt.” This way those who haven’t heard she’s being accused of corruption have been informed by McCaskill herself. And she didn’t even bother to contest the accusations! Voters are supposed to go to factcheck.com to find out what she’s been accused of (turns out it’s kickbacks to her very rich husband.)

The Republican candidates are all on the offensive. And the defensive position is not one of a winning side. Is there really nothing stronger we can say for ourselves other than some website says we are not corrupt?

Just when I realized I can work by the swimming pool, it started to rain and I couldn’t go again.

I’m a shockingly slow thinker in everything that’s not work-related. It took me 4 years to figure out I’d enjoy the pool next door.

So I organized a contest for published academic articles. The contest has monetary prizes, and many people applied. The submissions were anonymized, and the judges read them without any discussion or contact.

And you know what? We came up with the same list of winners. This is so cool! It’s not very impressive when this happens with unpublished pieces. But these are all published in prestigious places, yet the judges arrived at the same result independently.

U. of I. pledges free tuition to students in families earning less than $61K.

Everybody who makes $62,000+ heard the news and felt deep hatred for the higher education system.

The funny thing, as the linked article points out, is that these students already pay pretty much nothing in tuition. This announcement helps nobody. But it turns a huge number of people into enemies of higher education.

It’s as if universities competed in who did the worst in PR.

It looks like the networks filmed their documentaries on McCain long before he died and we’re sitting on them, waiting for him to die. It feels kind of disgusting, so I can’t even watch them. He had terminal cancer, OK, but still it’s an icky thing to do.

I’d be happy to support Social Democrats, who represent a venerable political tradition that has done a lot of good. Social Democrats were viciously persecuted by Socialists and slaughtered by them in huge numbers, so it’s not like one can use these appellations interchangeably. It’s pretty much like confusing socialists and national socialists (aka Nazis.)

“Social Democrats” is easier to pronounce than “Democratic Socialists.” Yet that’s not the term that was chosen. This is not a bug but a feature. But folks are so starved for a progressive alternative that they are choosing not to notice how much the alternative they are getting stinks.

To conclude today’s series of posts, I want to share that there’s been a change in recent years in the way students answer the question “What is socialism?”

All of a sudden, I started hearing the answer, “It’s when everybody gets a lot of free stuff, right?” And it’s hard to blame students if this morning’s New York Times offered this definition verbatim.

What’s really funny is that this vision of socialism is so deeply consumerist. Socialism, for today’s fantasists, means a lot more capitalism. The only thing that can possibly make this better is if the “everybody needs more stuff” folks are environmentalists, as well.

Another very puzzling argument I keep encountering is “When people say they are Democratic Socialists, they just mean they want the kind of thing that exists in the Scandinavian countries.”

If people want the Scandinavian model, though, why don’t they simply say so? Why do they use, instead, a term that no Scandinavian country ever used and that has been employed and still is employed exclusively by murderous regimes that slaughter, persecute and starve people by the million? Would it make much sense to say, “I think I’d prefer us to adopt the Canadian model, which from hereon I will refer to as Democratic Nazism. I know that Canadians don’t call their country a Democratic Nazi State of Canada but I still think it sounds cute.”

If you have got to choose a name, would it be all that hard to choose one that isn’t associated with some of the worst acts of genocide committed in recent memory and right now?