[ Posted Friday, August 11th, 2017 – 14:26 UTC ]
The most heartening thing I've seen so far is how unified the atmosphere is. I've been to Netroots in years following big election losses before, and some of these had a pervasive atmosphere of disappointment, if not outright depression. This is not the case this year at all, I'm happy to report, even though 2016 was the most dismal election loss Democrats have suffered in a long time. Instead of downcast attitudes, people have responded by energetically rededicating themselves to ushering in political change, and the overall feeling is actually one of optimism.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 29th, 2017 – 16:12 UTC ]
When will they ever learn? Once again, Donald Trump has almost completely hijacked the American news media for the day, by viciously attacking two media personalities on Twitter. The rest of the media then obligingly chased after this shiny, shiny object almost to the exclusion of all else. Again. We're all caught in this neverending cycle, it seems.
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[ Posted Monday, June 5th, 2017 – 15:25 UTC ]
Kellyanne Conway is right -- the media obsesses over presidential tweets from Donald Trump. What she fails to understand, though, is that there's a very good reason for this obsession. Trump tweets make news because they are newsworthy. If Trump tweets were bland and boring repetitions of White House policy, pre-vetted by the communications team, then it's likely nobody would pay any attention to them. But they're not. They are, as one interviewer pointed out to Kellyanne this morning, Trump's preferred method of communication to the American public. And what he's got to say makes news because nobody else in the administration can speak for Trump.
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[ Posted Thursday, June 1st, 2017 – 17:11 UTC ]
While I realize a momentous event happened in Washington today, I am choosing to let President Trump's announcement he's withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement sink in for a bit before commenting upon it. Instead, I'd like to offer up a personal farewell to Scott Pelley, since it was announced this [...]
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[ Posted Monday, May 22nd, 2017 – 16:41 UTC ]
President Donald Trump has only just begun his first road trip outside the United States, and he's already "exhausted," according to one of his own advisors. This may or may not be true, since anything either Trump or any of his spokespeople say at this point has to be taken with a grain of salt -- especially considering the "exhausted" comment was given as an excuse for a Trump gaffe (more on that in a bit). But this week's calendar for Trump seems to have been constructed on the theme of: "Any Trump campaign promises left unbroken? Well, let's see how many we can break in a single week!"
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 16th, 2017 – 15:35 UTC ]
I thought it'd be fun today to take a look at President Donald Trump's poll numbers. This is mainly because any casual interpretation of such polling would have to conclude that Trump's numbers are about to fall off a cliff. So I thought it'd be fun to take a "before" snapshot, to see where Trump was before the whole "telling secrets to Russia in the Oval Office" thing is reflected in his job approval polling. Over the next week or two, the impact of this week's scandal will become clear, but for now the polling data doesn't reflect any of it.
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[ Posted Wednesday, May 10th, 2017 – 16:36 UTC ]
Donald Trump hasn't even been in office for four whole months, and already he's being compared to Richard Nixon. That is both stunning as well as somewhat expected, really. Just on personality alone, Trump seems the most Nixonian figure to occupy the Oval Office since Tricky Dick himself roamed the hallways. Sooner or later, Trump's penchant for vengeance against his perceived enemies was going to cause some problems. It's now obvious that "sooner" won out over "later."
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 1st, 2017 – 18:03 UTC ]
President Donald Trump's first speech to Congress and to the American public was not a disaster of epic proportions. Normally, I wouldn't begin a speech review with such a statement, but with Trump, the possibility always exists (see: Trump's first press conference). Trump managed to clear the bar of "speaks like the public wants to hear a president speak, and not like an enraged adolescent on the playground." Again, for any other president this bar wouldn't even be mentioned, because it has never been an issue before now. Because it was Donald Trump, however, much of the audience watching the speech breathed a sigh of relief that Trump finally managed to "look presidential."
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[ Posted Monday, February 20th, 2017 – 18:52 UTC ]
Since it is Presidents' Day (or whatever else you call today, apostrophized or not), I thought I'd take it easy on our current president, and take a break from the regular ridicule I've been heaping upon him since he was sworn in. Today's supposed to be a noble holiday, after all, so I thought I'd make an extra effort at evenhandedness, and take a look back through history at some of the rocky starts various American presidents have had on the job.
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[ Posted Wednesday, February 8th, 2017 – 18:11 UTC ]
No, that's not a Donald Trump hair joke. It is nothing more than the end of a simile on lying. Rugs are the epitome of lying, since nothing lies more obviously than a rug. Of course, I could have gone with a different motif, but Al Franken had already used the title: "Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them," so I had to go with what was available, as it were.
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