Tammy Baldwin’s Net Approval Ranking in Bottom Ten

found online by Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin (D) received bad news last week when her net approval rating placed her in the bottom ten of U.S. Senators, according to Morning Consult last week.

“Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who are both seeking re-election, remain the least popular Democrats in states carried by Trump, with voters split down the middle over their job performance,” according to Morning Consult.

McCaskill is frequently listed as the number one target for Republicans heading into the 2018 election cycle.

– More –
 

GOP Pundit Class Gets Pay Day Calling Congress ‘Cowards’

found online by Raymond

 
From Frances Langum:

Last night Lawrence O’Donnell highlighted this op-ed in the Washington Post by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in which Gerson lambasted the Republican Congress for not standing up to Donald Trump.

Why can’t Republican legislators see the personal damage this might cause? Trump has made a practice of forcing people around him to lower their standards and abandon their ideals before turning against them when their usefulness ends. His servants are sucked dry of integrity and dignity, then thrown away like the rind of a squeezed orange. Who does Trump’s bidding and has his or her reputation enhanced? A generation of Republicans will end up writing memoirs of apology and regret.

What a terrible punishment for the crime of supporting Donald Trump. Your memoir will have regrets and apologies and a publishing contract with Regnery Press and you’ll get interviewed by Chris Matthews about “Lessons Learned.”

No shaved heads through the streets of Paris? Why the hell not?

– More –
 

Trump Slump

found online by Raymond

 
From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

The last handful of days have been a little bit of heart-in-mouth time for some traders on today’s market, as record sell-offs have been occurring, causing as of just today the largest drop in points in the Dow’s history–which is not really saying a lot, yet. This probably is reminiscent for some of the point drop in September 2008, but that had been building for some time, and had a lot of other poor indicators–I don’t know if this is the same thing at all. I don’t think it’s directly ascribable to Trump, although he likes to take credit for the economy, so…

Job creation has slowed here in the US–but that’s not surprising as we are nearly at full-employment, and wages are going up, which did not just start happening in the Trump era, thanks, but when labor starts to have an edge, capital worries. As a wage earner myself, I like stronger wage and employment figures, and prefer my investments and pension plan to be about the long-term index, and I don’t yet see a problem there…

Except the deregulation thing.

– More –
 

Brownback’s Horrible Policies Might Save the Republic


 

Louis XIV almost certainly never said it. The phrase was attributed to him by his enemies precisely because it would have been an outrageous thing even to think. The words are still easily recognized today.

L’Etat, c’est moi

I am the nation

When we hear modern echoes identifying an individual with the state, no matter how faint those echoes, we still take notice.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus did not see much in Donald Trump’s State of the Union to applaud. So they didn’t.

Donald Trump reacted:

…even on positive news, really positive news like that — they were like death. And un-American. Un-American.

Failing to applaud my President is an insult to more than a mere individual. It is an insult to America.

I mean they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.

As it turns out, those African Americans, those Democratic members of Congress, were worse than un-American.

Can we call that treason?

The boisterous presentation, and the crowd reaction, may suggest the President was joking.

Of course. Or half joking. Or some other fraction.

He was not joking a few weeks before when, during a break from a golf outing, he spoke about the ongoing investigation into possible campaign conspiracies with Russia. He seemed explicitly to identify himself as a personification of the country. Any investigation into his own possible wrongdoing hurts, not him, but America itself. Here are his words:

Continue reading “Brownback’s Horrible Policies Might Save the Republic”

Devin Nunes Racing Form

found online by Raymond

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Unlike most conservative pols, Devin Nunes is not an ideologue, he’s an apparatchik. It’s all about the career. He’s decided for whatever reason he’s hitching his star to Comrade Stupid.

But Nunes’ fate could change in a heart beat. Let’s look at California for a moment.

California uses a jungle primary system in which all candidates in all parties run together and allows all voters to vote at once. The catch is that the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, go to the general election.

– More –
 

Altered Carbon: Interestingly problematic

found online by Raymond

 
From PZ Myers:

Good news, everyone! In the future, we’ll have flying cars! And the world will be deeply multicultural, a melange of different ethnicities, all working side by side, with equal status. That’s the bright side of the science fiction universe in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.

Now the bad side. The key innovation in this story is the ability to upload and download minds. Everyone is walking around with a little disk in their neck that archives their mental state and memories continuously; some people also have a kind of brain wifi that allows them to periodically upload everything in their head to a remote backup. This means that if someone dies, they can just cut out that disk, insert it into a new body, and voila, you are revived! Unless someone shoots you in the neck, unfortunately; destroying the archive is Real Death. If you’ve got the wifi option, you can also restore from the last backup.

Wait, what’s so bad about that? It’s effective immortality! That’s where the series is most interesting, in exploring the consequences of radical new technology.

– More –