Douglas Whaley

I’d like to offer some minor relief for the hard pressed liberal community, which includes my much-oppressed husband, David Vargo, suffering greatly from the excesses of the Trump Administration (not yet a month old).  I present for your consideration “FAKE NEWS FOR LIBERALS!”  Just pretend these news snippets are real and easing of your stress will follow immediately.  Let’s get started. 1.  Conway and Spicer Discovered in Love Nest             This one is a shocker!  Though both are, in their words,“happily married” to others, Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to President Donald Trump, and Sean Spicer, Trump’s Press Secretary, were photographed in a compromising assignation at the Lincoln Memorial at 3 a.m. last Tuesday evening.  (See photo below)  Outraged, they’ve both denied they are the couple in the photograph.  “I’m super faithful to my wife,” Spicer said,” and, besides, I don’t like blon...

I’m pleased to say that I’ve had a small article published in a magazine, and have just received a copy of the relevant issue in the mail.  The magazine is Free Inquiry , February/March 2017, Vol. 37, No. 2.  The article is at page 54 in a segment labeled “Humanism at Large,” and is entitled “Creating the Bible: Water Into Wine.”  This piece of whimsy, taken from a prior blog post of mine, speculates how the authors of the Bible could have come up with the famous story from John 2 in which Jesus goes to a wedding and helps the host out with a wine shortage. I was thrilled when Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry , told me he would publish this piece.  The little blurb about me at the end mentions that I am the author of an atheist thriller “Imaginary Friend,” the novel I published some years ago and that has sold rather well.  It’s available on Amazon, and the first three chapters of that work can be read in the blog posts mentioned below....

Socrates----Jay Lawrence Westbrook Socrates arrived at the truth by asking those he was conversing with a series of questions until all was revealed.  Using the Socratic method in my law school classrooms for the last 47 years has been good training for arriving at the same goal: finding the best answer.  But above that, when I was in law school myself, my roommate was the great Jay Lawrence Westbrook, now a Professor of Law at the University of Texas and a world renowned figure in international bankruptcy law.  When I was in my 20s he taught me a fundamental rule of arguments: at the very heart of any dispute is one central fact of disagreement.  One.  Everything else is just noise—static.  Therefore to arrive at the crux of what’s really going on you have to get rid of the many things that are not at issue and find that one thing that is. Years ago when I was teaching law full time at OSU I gave a noon brown bag talk at the sch...

This is a slight rewrite of a prior post, but on an important, and annual topic of communication.  It's about 2017. Let's begin by agreeing that 2016 wasn't the happiest of years.                                                     "I'd give it a few minutes kid." To make the coming year better it's  very important  that we all agree that "2017" is henceforth to be pronounced "twenty-seventeen" as opposed to "two thousand and seventeen."    Why—you might ask, given all that is going wrong on this planet—is this issue important?   It's for reasons of being vocally "green," of course! Consider, blog readers, that "two thousand and seventeen" has  seven  syllables whereas "twenty-seventeen" has only  five .    Just  five !   Recently  on NBC News as the an...