Our district has voted – the Board – to go back to a choice between in class an on-line program or classroom program. It sounds (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
Another What if….?
01/17/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhat if we had hanged the leaders of the Confederacy? Would Reconstruction have continued? Would Blacks in the South continue living under “slavery by another (Continue Reading)
In Their Bosom
01/01/2021 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe Old South (there is no new South) kept in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction. Fifty-five percent of African-Americans live in the (Continue Reading)
His niece nailed it
12/29/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentMary Trump said Trump will bypass the inauguration of Biden not because he hates he lost or because he hates Biden or because he wants (Continue Reading)
Listen To Donny Deutsch!
12/08/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOn Morning Joe on Dec. 7, 2020, Donny Deutsch made an extremely clear statement. Joe passed over it because I believe he still has trouble (Continue Reading)
Symbols are important
12/02/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentOur language sometimes scrunches word meaning down into what is commonly heard. Symbolism is one of those words, as in “It’s only symbolic.” That takes (Continue Reading)
Slicing carefullly what commentators say
11/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentA while back, around 2018, I took Tucker Carlson to task (I hear he was devastated on reading my blog) for saying that demographic change (Continue Reading)
Role Reversal
10/26/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentWith the election upon us, I’ll post this list of reversals, things the conservatives accused liberals of that have proved to be true of them, (Continue Reading)
Many voices make one think
10/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentBack when I worked as a therapist in a mental health center, a psychiatric clinic, we charted our contacts with our patients. The medical model (Continue Reading)
The phony Romans
10/17/2020 Pat Barrett Add Comment“The embrace of demographic determinism is self-defeating: it causes the right to cease any attempt to do the hard work of persuasion and winning new (Continue Reading)
ad mulierem argument
10/13/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAn ad hominem argument, from Latin for “to or toward the man/person”, bypasses the elements of fact and evidence in a judgment and judges the (Continue Reading)
Who Are These People?
09/24/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentJoe Scarborough this morning asked, Who are these people? referring to people at the Trump rally who cheered when he described a reporter being injured (Continue Reading)
Donald Trump wants to believe he matters……..
09/01/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThat is a line in John Dean and Bob Altemeyer’s new book on Trump, “Authoritarian Nightmare.” After doing a decent job of outlining Trump’s childhood, (Continue Reading)
Nowhere to tack this
08/30/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’ve tried finding an entry to tack this latest onto but can’t find anything recent that is appropriate: the showdown in Portland between protesters and (Continue Reading)
Living on stereotypes
08/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentRepublicans and conservatives (same thing these days) live on stereotypes. Stereotypes are the bedrock of the way they think, especially about people. Here is an (Continue Reading)
One Trumper got it right
08/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentAn administration official said that voting rights are a liberal left priority. He is right. The right has always gone along with efforts to keep (Continue Reading)
To S & D
08/08/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentSo long……. For the second to the last quarter of my life (I hope) I have been trying to get to just what conservatism is. (Continue Reading)
Baa Baa White Sheep
07/17/2020 Pat Barrett 4 CommentsNow who’s the sheep, doing whatever Trump says, including ditching your mask during a pandemic? Hilarious. That’s how to describe the real sheep after they (Continue Reading)
As he unravels, so do his supporters…
07/14/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentNot long after Trump appeared on the campaign trail and certainly after he took office, I pushed the idea that Trump has a severe personality (Continue Reading)
A very partial scandal list
07/10/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentRachel Maddow made a short list of Trump scandals to show how quickly we forget. One just nudges the last one out until we have (Continue Reading)
The Perfect Storm aka cluster f***
07/08/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentBy the end of this summer, just during the party conventions and the election, we will see: continuing rise in virus cases, high unemployment, evictions, (Continue Reading)
The Tale of Little Katie Miller
07/07/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe excerpt Maddow published on the show quoted Miller as telling Soboroff: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think (Continue Reading)
A few Trump goals met
07/02/2020 Pat Barrett Add CommentA U.S. border sealed tight? Check. Canada no longer lets Americans cross over into their country. The Canadians are not worried we’ll rape their women (Continue Reading)