Opinion

Upon exposure to harsh political attack ads or campaigns that make outrageous, easily debunked claims, in the old days I'd react with skepticism: “Nobody will believe that crap."

The classic First Amendment ideal would come to mind – that the searing light of truth is the best way to expose falsehoods and lies in the political sphere.

Justice Samuel Alito wants desperately for us to believe that everything is just fine at the Supreme Court. Indeed, in his view the court is a victim.

Before an audience at Notre Dame on Sept. 30, Alito denounced "unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court." He aimed his outrage at the media, at leading legal academics, and at people like me who are concerned about, as he put it, the Supreme Court "deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view."

"Women's work"
Standard views by economists as to what determines wages will include worker productivity or supply and demand. Meanwhile, many economic sociologists claim that our societal assumptions about the value of a job influence the wages it can command. If a job is seen as "women's work," the wages for that job decline.

One version of this claim links the five c's — cleaning, catering, caring, cashiering and clerical work — to lower pay, because these jobs are predominantly female. One can see this without any complex analysis.

The thing you are not hearing from the Washington press corps is this: The Democrats are the party of the American majority. Right now, they represent the full range of legitimate politics. That includes the full range of ideologies, from conservative to democratic socialist. They aren't totally alone. There are maybe 10 House Republicans who want to cut deals. Ditto for maybe five Senate Republicans. Other than that, the Democrats are on their own. Frankly, that's how it ought to be.

The Washington press corps has created in recent weeks what Post columnist Eugene Robinson calls The Narrative. That's the story about a Democratic Party that can't get its act together, about a president who can't get competing factions to stop bickering. If they can't do that, then they are headed for defeat in the coming midterms. Yeah, well, Robinson said Tuesday, let's take all that with a grain of salt.

When 37-year-old Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress on October 5, she brought thousands of stolen documents with her. They are the most conclusive evidence yet that the top social media company knows it profits from harming the public.

Like many whistleblowers, Haugen — a member of the civic integrity team — took an exciting job only to be implicated in what she believes to be an ethical catastrophe. Much has been made of her statement on "60 Minutes" that teenage girls who use Facebook are more likely to suffer from depression and self-harm. Endangering children rightly grabs the public's sympathy and concern.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that some 4.3 million people had quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9 percent of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.

All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since last spring.

More than 44.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Of them, over 715,000 have died.

But what about the millions who lived? Have they fully recovered?

When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they'd never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they'd be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate.

Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema.

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was "shocked by these interviews" and stood by its "commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change."

Wood's reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick's Café in the 1942 film "Casablanca." After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

The looming covid fight is about vaccinating children, and all indications are that it will be ugly.

While tens of millions of parents, likely those who got vaccines themselves, will line up their children under 12 to protect themselves and school classmates against contagion, polls, experience, and logic show that resistance to vaccination and denial of a medical emergency will make jabbing the young even more an emotional confusion than it has been with adults.

Right-wingers are rushing to defend Raiders head coach John Gruden following his resignation amid a series of reports that Gruden spoke in racist, sexist, and homophobic terms spanning roughly a decade.

Jesse Kelly, conservative talk radio host of "The Jesse Kelly Show," suggested that the push for Gruden's dismissal was led by "a bunch of lying, whiny pretenders in this country."

Democrats find themselves, in the midst of an intense battle to pass President Biden's domestic agenda while avoiding a debt limit showdown, once again asking the perennial post-election question: How can they win back white, non-college-educated voters?

This has been the Democrats' big conundrum for over 30 years now and most of the time they end up with exactly the same possible strategies. Either appeal to the white working class' economic self-interest, pander to their prejudices or triangulate against their own base. Sure there are other strategies for winning elections thrown out there, like find the apathetic voters who don't bother with politics and get them to the polls or wait for demographic changes that will bring more voters into their coalition. Often there is a "one from column A and one from column B" quality about this discussion, but there really hasn't been anything new added to the mix for several decades.

The unofficial kickoff of the former guy's presidential campaign was a rally Saturday night in Des Moines. Unfortunately for the GOP, Trump's speech focused on his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen rather than on Joe Biden, whose approval ratings keep sliding because of the Delta variant's continuing impact as well as fumbles at the border and in exiting Afghanistan.

All indications are that Trump is going to cast the midterm elections as a referendum on himself rather than on Biden. That's hardly surprising, given Trump's sociopathic ego. He cast his entire presidency as a referendum on himself.