Larry Schwartz, AlterNet

Life is full of commonly believed myths and people’s behavior is often guided by those truisms. But are they true? Some are, but many are as false as the idea that tax breaks magically create jobs.

I suppose there must have been a time when the phrase “It’s a dog’s life” made immediate sense. Today, however, as a signifier of a life of difficulty, this phrase doesn't convey as much suffering. Americans treat their dogs like… well, like themselves. We spend $23 billion on pet foods every year, much of that cash on gourmet varieties, including vegan and gluten-free (and just FYI, don’t do that, dogs are carnivores: They like and need meat, and if they could talk, they would tell you they could care less about gluten.) We spend $15 billion a year on medical care for our pooches. They accompany us to the grocery store, cafes, airports (JFK Airport in New York is set to open a terminal devoted to pets), even to work. Dog parks are proliferating in cities across the U.S. Doggie Couture is real.

There are scientific facts that most of us accept as true. The Earth is round. Check. E=MC squared. Check. Humans evolved from apes. Not exactly.

If there was ever any doubt that conspiracy theories course through the dark, troubled mind of Donald Trump, his tweets in the weeks since he won the election should dispel that notion. Hot and bothered by the inconvenient fact that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2 million votes (and counting) and that he is president due only to the questionable decision by James Madison to deny direct voter election of our presidents and instead delegate that task to an Electoral College, the birther-in-chief-elect took to his preferred social media platform. On November 27, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Before 1988, when presidential contender Gary Hart was brought down by the media for a sex scandal, the private lives of politicians and presidents were considered just that: private. Hart dared the press to follow him, and they did—all the way to a pleasure cruise aboard the Monkey Business and a picture of pretty Donna Rice sitting on Hart's lap. Hart’s travails, and this turning point in American media and politics, are detailed in Matt Bai’s surprisingly sympathetic portrait, All the Truth Is Out. In Bai’s telling, Hart, who never held political office again, wasn’t the only loser in the deal. Politicians have been stalked ever since the new era of gossipy, “gotcha” political journalism was born.