No I didn't. You did the heavy lifting fleshing out what was wrong. I merely summarized it.

I yield to no one in my belief in the ignorance of the American public, but surveys like this don't tell us much. As you say, respondents may not know what rights the First Amendment protects, but they have a tolerably good idea, if somewhat muddled, about what rights they have and that they are somehow protected by the Constitution. Chapter and verse, and the straightening out of some misconceptions, is for the professionals. And surely they know that there is a President, and a Congress, and a Supreme Court, and they probably know there are other federal courts as well. Maybe they think the alphabet agencies are a fourth branch of government, which is technically incorrect but not an unreasonable thing to think. Even the professionals sometimes think they kinda-sorta are, so I can't get down on lay folk who reify a metaphor.
I'm quite certain that the public's actual ignorance, accurately determined, would be appalling, but I can't get the vapors based on what surveys like this show.

Exactly. If the people who are already there could buy enough good stuff, however you define "good stuff," it wouldn't be the place it is. Lending money to a true Hamiltonian to make stuff other true Hamiltonians can't afford to buy -- unless they prefer fancy cupcakes to rent or healthcare -- isn't a business model that works. I'm not sure lending money to true Hamiltonians to make stuff true Hamiltonians already can afford to buy moves the ball closer to the goal either.

I'm waiting to see if vast numbers of noisy people who have no reason even to have an opinion will fill up the internet and the cable talk shows with overheated blather about this.

Size matters.

Hillary won the national popular vote by about what most folks predicted. She lost the election because of under 80,000 votes concentrated in three states. With those kinds of numbers, it's child's play to prove that anything you want to fasten on to was why she lost.

I'd really like to see a Frederick Douglass biopic. He's an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.

There may be a reason you thought it necessary to point out the obvious, but I'm not sure I see it.

Americans aren’t blind. That’s why they voted like they did.

If the Democrats are the real racists, how come the racists vote Republican?

Teams didn't come out before 2009. Teams weren't forbidden to come out for any particular reason, they just didn't. There was no significance to that then, just the way things were done.They began coming out in 2009 precisely because the owners wanted to make a political show. If they went back to the pre-political practice, some would see it as pro-Trump only because that's how they would want to see it. Screw them.

Can anyone identify any political issue, other than representation, on which large states, as such, lean one way and small states, as such, lean another? On what issue would NY, Pa, Mass. & Virginia be on one side and Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, and South Carolina be on the other?

About a decade ago, my wife and I (both NYC residents) were vacationing in Maine. We had stopped overnight in Portland -- which we found to be a nice, friendly, but still somewhat sophisticated city -- to break up the trip and stopped in Rockland to get supplies. When we told the cashier we had just driven up from Portland, her eyes went wide and she said she would be afraid to go there. Two years ago, we were staying in Rockland, and I read an op-ed in the local paper by an ex-cop who explained that he felt the need to carry a gun all the time because of the dangers of Rockland. True, there are some dicey areas -- hell, even an out-of-towner can locate the meth labs after a few days -- but come on.

Until 2009, stadiums played the national anthem before the players took the field. Let's go back to that. Make everyone happy. Or at least less unhappy.

If Kaepernick were a better player than he is, he'd have a job. If he were a worse player than he is, there wouldn't be any question why he doesn't have a job.

You seem to know more about Trump’s inner beliefs than he does. I find that unlikely.

It's far from obvious that Trump has any understanding of his own inner beliefs.

Oddly enough, I long thought, to the limited extent that I thought about it all, that Trump was Jewish. He was a NYC real-estate developer (look at the names of the serious ones that really are what Trump pretended to be) and embodied many of the deplorable characteristics often attributed to Jews by anti-Semites.

OK, let's have a contest and find a non-sexist synonym for the phenomenon now described as "clutching pearls." Because it is a phenomenon and it needs a name.

Anything that starts by asking the reader to think seriously about some emanation from Ross Douthat is bound to end badly.

William Irvingson Kristol is on board with this stuff? I hadn't seen the Radical Center before. Much of the left part of the political spectrum would be delirious to get most of this through. So would I. Except, of course, that if Kristol is for it, it must be wrong, so I'll have to reconsider.

When Jesse "The Body" Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota, I would always tell people they should have elected Bobby "The Brain" Heenan instead. Not everybody got it.

I have gone through life as a cheerful pessimist. I don't believe in the power of positive thinking, because s**t happens. But I do believe in the power of negative thinking. Although positive thinking is nowhere near enough to succeed, negative thinking is usually enough to fail.

A 71-year-old white man from Queens raised by a man arrested for his part in a Klan rally has a long record of public actions and utterances tending to support the conclusion that he is a racist. Conclusive? No, but look at all of it, and then look at the utter lack of any actions and utterances that point the other way. The only arguments I can think of for the theory that Trump is not a racist are that he lacks the necessary moral seriousness to have any kind of real beliefs on that, or any other subject, or that his assholery is so comprehensive that he doesn't bother subdividing it.

Re www2: I assume the original paper explains this, but why would natural selection weed out predispositions to medical issues that don't generally become problems until we're past child-rearing ages?

It is damned inconvenient to live in a society where robbing, raping, and killing are common and unpunished, and it would be damned inconvenient whether there is a god or not. It is damned inconvenient to live in a society that does not recognize certain limits on the powers of others, like governments or our employers or our neighbors, over us -- "rights" is as good a name as any for this idea -- and it would be damned inconvenient whether there is a god or not. Whether a big, powerful being wants us not to rob, rape, and kill and wants us to recognize certain rights in others, and will kick our asses if we don't would give us a strong practical reason to do what this being wants, but this being could be God or Galactus or Superman -- or even the cops, if there are enough of them. The big, powerful being doesn't add anything to the analysis.

No, it didn't.