[ Posted Friday, February 9th, 2024 – 19:29 UTC ]
This was a very bad week for Republicans in Congress, pretty much all around. The Speaker of the House proved incapable of counting votes and thus saw two big defeats on the floor, and over in the Senate the Republicans cut off their noses (elephant trunks?) to spite their faces in a spectacular turnaround from their own basic bargaining position. GOP incompetence was on display on both sides of the Capitol, to put it bluntly.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 8th, 2024 – 15:55 UTC ]
Donald Trump is, without doubt, the leader of the Republican Party right now. He is cruising to the Republican presidential nomination and the party's base has rallied around him almost to the exclusion of all others. But below the level of Trump, there is a growing leadership vacuum in the party, as everyone scrambles to bend whichever way the Trump winds happen to be blowing at that particular moment, while still attempting to hold the party together. This lack of secondary leadership came to the fore this week in three notable ways.
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[ Posted Friday, February 2nd, 2024 – 18:46 UTC ]
New monthly employment numbers were released today showing a surprisingly-high 353,000 new jobs were created in January. The stock market is currently setting new all-time highs. The American economy has recovered from COVID far faster and far better than all other major countries, in fact. Inflation has come back down, gasoline prices are down, and wages are up (growing faster than inflation). Signups for Obamacare hit another record this year (outpacing last year's record by five million!) and America has the lowest uninsured rate in history. Domestic oil production is also setting records. So what are conservatives obsessed with in reaction to all this good news? Taylor Swift. No, really....
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[ Posted Thursday, February 1st, 2024 – 17:32 UTC ]
In the Before-Times, back when Donald Trump was merely a minor television celebrity, anyone in politics or the media who openly espoused a theory that the Pentagon had for years been running a "psychological operation" (or "psy-op," which sounds so much cooler) to boost the fortunes of the most popular singer alive, and furthermore that because she and a star football player were now an item that the National Football League had (obviously!) conspired to advance his team to the Super Bowl (where the fix was already in for them to win) -- all so that the singer could then announce her endorsement of the sitting president -- would have been laughed off the national stage forthwith. The idea would have been considered no more than a product of the fever dreams of a conspiracy-spreading lunatic. The ravings of a nutter. Complete whackjobbery. "Tinfoil hats" would have been mentioned derisively, as America collectively guffawed at their craziness.
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[ Posted Monday, January 29th, 2024 – 16:28 UTC ]
There is an interesting idea making the rounds in the political punditry world of late, and I have to say it is an intriguing one. Nikki Haley has a very slim chance of chalking up any wins in Republican primaries, either before or on Super Tuesday, so sooner or later she's going to have to bow to the inevitable and drop out of the GOP race. This will leave Trump as the Republican nominee, but what if this isn't the end of the campaign trail for Haley? Instead of disappearing, what would happen if Haley then ran as the No Labels candidate?
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[ Posted Friday, January 26th, 2024 – 19:00 UTC ]
A staggering amount of Republican hypocrisy is now on full display in Washington. Pretty much ever since Joe Biden took office, Republicans have been screaming: "Border crisis! It's a crisis! This crisis needs immediate action!" This has been reinforced in an enormous way by the rightwing media echo chamber, who features the "Border Crisis!" storyline on a nightly basis for its audience. Scary images of border-crossers are shown, the word "invasion" is tossed about willy-nilly, and the fearmongering of immigrants is paramount.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024 – 18:45 UTC ]
As I sit here watching the New Hampshire primary election results roll in, there don't seem to be any huge surprises developing yet -- most of the votes aren't in yet, so I suppose there's still time... but the chances are the headlines are soon going to be reading something along the lines of: "It's Over Almost Before It Began," as both Donald Trump and Joe Biden wrap up their respective nominations.
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[ Posted Friday, January 19th, 2024 – 17:54 UTC ]
President Joe Biden got some excellent news today: the "vibecession" seems to be over. For those unfamiliar with this neologism, the term was coined by an educator a while back to explain the disconnect between the economic reality (measured by all the economic indicators) and how people actually felt about the economy. The economy has been doing amazingly well in recovering from the COVID pandemic slump, while at the same time public perception has remained a lot gloomier.
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[ Posted Friday, January 12th, 2024 – 18:50 UTC ]
It is shocking (it always is), but here we are on the brink of the 2024 presidential election cycle's official start. The Iowa caucuses will be held Monday. Most of us, thankfully, will have a few more months to go before being faced with the prospect of going to the polls for our state's primary, when (hopefully) the weather will be a lot better than it is predicted to be in the Hawkeye State three days from now. They may be heading to their polls in the midst of a blizzard, with the temperature forecast to be: "Oh CRAP it is cold!" with windchill factors being as low as: "I can't feel my toes... or my face... just leave me here in this snowbank for the wolves to find...."
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 9th, 2024 – 16:40 UTC ]
Donald Trump has long believed that because he was president, he was constitutionally allowed to do anything he pleased, without any possibility of ever having to answer for any of it in any way. He explicitly stated this belief while he was president and he has claimed the same sweeping immunity ever since he left office as well. He truly believes that somewhere in the Constitution is a clause that essentially bestows the divine right of kings upon the U.S. president. A president's actions can never be challenged in court because of this supposed loophole, in other words (according to Trump).
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