Month: February 2019

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

His approval ratings have bounced back from the trough of the shutdown, but they’re still among the lowest of any postwar president.

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have just about recovered all of the ground lost during the partial government shutdown. He’s back up to 42.5 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average estimate, the best number he’s had since the beginning of the shutdown. His disapproval rating is 53.2 percent, an improvement, but still still higher than when it started climbing in mid-December, around the time he threatened to close the government and accept the blame. At the low point during the shutdown, Trump’s approval rating was 39.3 percent and disapproval was 56 percent.

Even if he’s doing better, he’s still in pretty bad shape: Compared with all the presidencies of the polling era (starting with Harry Truman), Trump’s approval level through 762 days in office beats only Ronald Reagan’s and Jimmy Carter’s at this point in their tenure. Reagan’s big rally was about to start as a recession was ending.

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From Professor PZ Myers:

Do you know why Minnesota is overrun with jihadists? Do you? DO YOU?

This is why Minnesota is being overrun by Jihadists. People like this pic.twitter.com/Kj7oUtniSp

— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) February 23, 2019

Chevys with bumper stickers, that’s why.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the NRA has evolved from gun safety and education and being a general proponent of second amendment rights, to being a political monster that supports the Republican party (or is just very necessarily supported by Republican candidates because you can’t be a real Republican if you aren’t NRA cleared, so…) and that NRA rhetoric has gotten very…extra in the digital age. But the connection between the group that explicitly supports the second amendment seems to thrive on its connection to the folks that think they have reasons to stockpile weapons, and that’s really concerning. Call it the “Chekhov’s gun” of politics–you show people being really concerned about using weapons and buying loads of them in the first act, and you should be expecting them to use them, eventually.

The reason this is exceptionally egregious right now, though, is that the same weapons-stockpiling formerly anti-government violence-oriented types are gravitating to pro-government so long as it’s their sort of folks–and the violence they want to bring isn’t really good for democracy or peace.

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• This week’s note in Alternative Facts comes from FactCheck.org as President Trump boasts that deficits seem to be coming down. Anyone want to take that bet?
   
• Green Eagle gets a bit irate at a Washington Post account of vote fraud that manages to both side a one sided story.
   
• News Corpse tracks calls by Fox News personalities for making the Mueller report a secret document, never to be seen by any of us.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors reacts to a revelation as the then future President unwittingly introduces his son to said son’s future ex-wife multiple times. Good punchline.
   
• Is my president getting weaker each day? Jonathan Bernstein finds examples even of staff members and executive agencies ignoring questionable Trump orders.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit doesn’t get the Trump humor as my President wants retribution against Saturday Night Live for unfairly laughing at him.
   
• Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta gave a pedophile of great wealth a sweetheart sentencing deal. Professor PZ Myers seems irritated at having to explain that sex trafficking that includes molesting kids is something other than an alternate lifestyle.
   
• Dave Dubya takes a look at domestic terrorism and the chief political cheerleader.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony takes a cartoon look at those white Americans who can’t seem to assimilate into American society.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged gazes upon hate crimes, a mass assassination plot, and lots and lots of ultrabrave war talk, and suggests the real national emergency is some of those already here.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post finds more American examples of socialism that everybody loves.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds and documents the plagarism. I had no idea that any serious research had ever been done in breast massage as a way of preventing pregnancy, much less that it was copied word for word in the Medical Journal of The Islamic Republic of Iran.

 
From Infidel753:

What Ilhan Omar did earlier this month — invoking an old anti-Semitic trope about shady rich international Jews manipulating politics behind the scenes with money — was at least as bad as posing in blackface, as Northam did. And it was contemporary, not from 35 years ago, representing her current views rather than some juvenile stupidity which intervening decades of maturity might have washed away. Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership were right to come down on her like a ton of bricks about it. This once again draws a clear line between Democrats, who will not and cannot tolerate such bigotry in their ranks, and Republicans, who almost never condemn the constant barrage of bigotry of all kinds from their own, notably from Trump himself.

Omar’s apology was unequivocal, and I’m willing to cut her some slack on this, especially since she came to the US in 1995 as a refugee from Somalia and may have been genuinely unaware of some of the history of anti-Semitic propaganda memes in the West. But if she ever does anything like this again, the leadership must force her to resign. We are not the Republicans.

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From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

In a statement on social media on Friday, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Green Bay) questioned both the national emergency declaration by the president and the budget compromise which passed with little deliberation.

“Why do we have a Congress?” Gallagher asked on Facebook and Twitter. “Presumably we have a Congress to deliberate, debate, and legislate. When it comes to border security, Congress has done none of these things.”

Gallagher continued with a criticism of the budget compromise.

“The appropriators released a 1100+ page omnibus bill after midnight today,” Gallagher wrote. “We suspended (i.e. violated) the rules to vote on it less than 24 hours later with no real deliberation or debate. And obviously the bill does not solve the border security problem, it merely punts it to the 2020 election, meaning the problem will only get worse.”

About the declaration of an emergency at the border, Gallagher had a warning for his fellow conservatives:

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From driftglass:

It turns out that while Carl Sagan’s parable of two antagonists, each with a fistful of matches, in a locked room awash with gasoline —

— might have been an accurate and memorable way to describe the need for nuclear arms control during the Cold War, it doesn’t work at all when it comes to modern American politics.

Because in modern American politics it turns out that while there are indeed two antagonists stuck together in a locked room awash with gasoline, one of the antagonists — the Republican Party — actually wants to burn the building down.

In fact, they spend all their political and media power to flick lit matches into corners filled with terrified women and children. With migrants and minorities. With the old and the infirm. With our most stalwart allies and with our constitution.

And they laugh about it. Let that sink in.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Free market advocates have often used the watermelon analogy–”green on the outside, red on the inside”–to describe the relationship between the Environmentalism movement and socialists. As the theory goes, socialism was supposed to bring prosperity to all while capitalism collapsed into a perpetual cycle of the rich getting richer while “the masses” got poorer. When the reality was that as the rich got richer, the general standard of living, even for the poor, soared, socialists faced a crisis. The crisis was deepened when it became clear that the poverty of the socialist countries was “achieved” by brutal, repressive tyrannies.

But they didn’t give up their socialist dreams. They came up with a new mantra to advance socialism–Environmentalism, originally called Ecology. The new playbook claimed that all of this capitalist prosperity was ruining the Earth. The original culprit was pollution, a very real problem. But rather than give up on capitalism, Americans cleaned up the pollution, but largely kept the capitalism. The prosperity and industrial progress continued on a progressively cleaner path. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the crisis reached its climax.

The socialists then turned to climate change, the ultimate environmental catastrophe. “It’s climate change” can be trotted out to explain every bad thing, from routine extreme weather, to corporate bankruptcies, to terrorism. In order to save the planet’s climate, draconian central planning–i.e., socialism–must be imposed on all economic activity..

There is plenty of evidence to back the watermelon analogy.

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