1. America has the highest marginal effective tax rate  (MERT) in the industrial world.  (editorial, “Ford’s Tango With Trump”.)Technically, this is true, but, as American Progress points out:
   

   Tax spending in the form of corporate tax breaks for certain groups of companies—such as oil and gas producers, insurance companies, U.S. multinationals, as well as others—amounts to more than $150 billion annually. These tax breaks enable companies to pay a much lower effective tax rate. In other words, these tax breaks dramatically reduce the amount of a corporation’s income that is subject to the 35 percent statutory corporate income tax rate, making their overall effective tax rate lower than the statutory rate—in some cases, much lower. For example, in a study that compared income companies reported on their 2010 financial books with income that they reported on their 2010 corporate tax returns, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that profitable U.S. corporations paid an effective tax rate of 22.7 percent. In a 2012 report, the U.S. Department of the Treasury found that U.S. corporate effective tax rates were in the same range as those of its G7 trading partners despite the higher statutory corporate income tax rate in the United States.

2. Health care costs are rising because of the burdens imposed by Obamacare.  9letter to the editor). Yes, health care costs are rising, but more slowly than average between 2013-16.  Health care costs will continue to rise after Obamacare has been repealed and replaced.
3. “President Obama pledged to wield a pen and phone during his second term rather than engage with Congress.” (op-ed, “Trump Can Ax the Clean Power Plan by Executive Order”).  Obama actually tried early in his term, during 2013, to get bipartisan legislation on immigration reform, gun control, and a grand budget agreement, but to no avail.
4. College learning outcomes are measured solely by how many graduates get jobs in their field immediately after graduation. (op-ed: “Entrepreneurial Solutions to Skyrocketing Tuition.”) Learning outcomes actually come in many forms–community service, and voluntarism,  critical thinking skills, citizenship skills, appreciating the arts,  working in teams, being able to pout together an argument using evidence, etc.
5. We have to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal lest the Russians or Chinese unleash first-strike attacks.  (op-ed: “Trump’s Nuclear Deterrence challenge”) . This nuclear scare-mongering is based on Herman Kahn’s Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD) theory, also extracted in today’s WSJ op-ed pages. Is the Journal paving the way for a new nuclear arms race with the Russians and Chinese? If so, Louis Menand’s reflections on Kahn’s deterrence mentality will ring true:
   

   the Cold War “ontology of the enemy”—the image of the adversary as a “cold-blooded, machinelike opponent . . . a mechanized Enemy Other.” The machine does not have ideals or values, issues on which it might compromise or goals that might encompass something other than its own aggrandizement. It wants only to win, and every move it makes is a move in that game. It’s a short step from this abstraction to the domino theory, the belief that Communist expansion is an inexorable and practically mindless force.

1. Dem economic policies have undermined the middle and lower classes. (Kimberley Strassel, “The Democrats Double Down.”)
2. Small businesses are drowning under ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank. (Srassel)
3. The Dems have lost power because of scandal, laziness, a disdain of ordinary people (especially women), and a loss of principle. (Strassel)
4. Europe is being overwhelmed by a Syrian refugee flow caused solely by Obama’s reluctance to support opposition to Assad. (editorial: “Barack and Angela Say Farewell”).
5. Obama was more willing to talk about leading the west than actually leading it. (editorial–see above).
6. It’s sexist to say that women voted against Hillary because they were skeptical about women’s political leadership. Women voted against Hillary because they thought for themselves and didn’t trust her. (letter to the editor)
7. Current demonstrators against a Trump presidency are the haters and bigots they are demonstrating against. (letter to the editor)
8. Unless checked by Trump, Radical Islam will usher in a new domino effect in its headlong rush toward world domination.(columns on Melvin Laird).

1.blaming the housing crash on minorities

2.casting the Tea Party/GOP as the populist workers’ party when their first orders of business will be deregulating the financial industry, eliminating the estate tax,  and passing the largest-ever tax cuts for the wealthy.

3.  US schools and teachers unions universally treated Obama’s election with “rallies and songs of homage,” but portrayed Romney, Bush and Trump as proto-fascist racists and war criminals.

4. EPA regulations cost $7 billion annually, and  that the environmental and health regulatory burden since 1980 has cost each American $13,000. Never mind any health benefits from clean air and water, reduced smoking, etc.

5. repealing the Volcker Rule and other regulations designed to force banks to be more capitalized and have less risk (aka lowered asset-based leverage ratios) will set the banks free, add to their liquidity, and unleash a new era of financial entrepreneurship.

Be very afraid.

calumny: lamestream media attacks on Trump. The self-satisfied, self-congratulatory uptown media elites are about to get their heads handed to them in the general election. aka, “smear.”

collective responsibility: why all American Muslims are complicit in any act of domestic terrorism.

diversity: perversity

extreme vetting: making it much more difficult for immigrants to come into the US. In essence, a revival of fortress America. When does “vetting” become “extreme?” Is it like
“enhanced interrogation?” Doesn’t “extreme”imply going too far?

historic amnesia: what the Dems practice when they ignore the damage Obama/Clinton  have done in Iraq. Syria, Russia and Libya

the fate of the USA as we know it: what’s at stake in the general election. This apocalyptic language is used in every election, but has special significance this time around because of the Trumpians’ “clash of civilizations” drumbeat. They see this election as a catastrophic event, the extinction of their values and America’s identity and honor.

frenzied: liberal attacks on Trump. The innuendo here is that the Dems are panicking because they’re ahead in the polls and Trump has a secret army of voters just over the hill that he will deploy come election time.

hyperliteralism: what the lamestream media reverts to when reporting on Donald Trump’s campaign statements. Whereas Trump is either joking, or being sarcastic or deliberately provocative, the media take on an almost autistic interpretive limitation in holding him to the literal sense of his words.

language: according to Trump, in his Hugh Hewitt interview, what he says is what becomes reality because the public accepts his meaning of words, as in calling Obama and Clinton the “co-founders of Isis.”  Reminiscent of what the Mad Hatter tells Alice about language:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

nuisance flooding: natural and temporary changes in sea level. Liberals call it “man-made climate change,” but it’s really just nature acting natural. This term actually was coined in 2015 by Florida Governor Rick Scott, who forbade mention of climate change.

teeing up the cops: what Obama/Clinton do when they talk about “police violence” or praise Black Lives Matter. In practice, every criticism of the police is now being framed as undermining law and order and justice, and turning the police into the victims.

$7.50-an-hour wage: the first rung on the ladder of opportunity. No matter that the other rungs are cut off or inaccessible.

compromise: defeat

ever-expanding: the federal bureaucracy, by definition.

eye-rolling: any Hillary answer, usually accenting the lie she’s telling,and often in the form of a screamed or hysterical answer.

high value college education: anything that translates into good job prospects. Liberal arts students are stuck with “high price” rather than “high value” educations. Critical inquiry, historical knowledge, and even basic cultural literacy are all discounted in this Gradgrindian calculus that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

pragmatist: what Donald Trump will morph into now that he has the GOP nomination secured.  This is really rhetorical shorthand for him disowning or “forgetting” all of the outrageous, divisive  campaign promises that created his electoral momentum.

raid: any government regulation of business, especially consumer protection regulation, which amounts to a “shakedown” of US businesses, and is a form of liberal racketeering.

supply-side structural reforms: radical tax reform and pro-competition regulatory reform. This is an unnecessarily abstruse way of stating the core Tea Party/GOP principles of cut ting taxes and ending government regulation.