February 2017

    Watching the president speak to Congress, I’m struck by lie after lie after lie after lie that is scrolling across the teleprompter, into the president’s eye, and straight out of his mouth. I struggled with how to discuss all the lies that just fell from those pursed little lips like drool from an infant’s mouth, and I realized that it just isn’t possible. I don’t have a staff of people who can furiously research every lie he tells and set it right. I’m just me. So since there is only one of me, I decided I should focus on just one lie. Or,Read More →

This brief exchange happened on Fox News this Sunday morning between Howard Kurtz and Tucker Carlson during a discussion about the president being upset over the media’s use of anonymous sources: CARLSON: And so I have used anonymous sources and I will continue to. I had lunch with one of them today. But Trump may be saying something different, which is that they are saying things that are untrue, and I think you can prove that. KURTZ: That’s a better argument, I think. And there has been a lot of leaking of classified stuff, and I can see the president being upset about that. Kurtz decidedRead More →

  A few months before the 2016 election, the Obama administration did something that received a small amount of attention. The Obama Justice Department released a memo stating they were going to diminish their use of for-profit prisons until they were no longer be used at all. In a normal society, the empty prison cells are a good thing. It means crime is down. It means we are safer. In a society that employs for-profit prisons, empty cells mean lost revenue for stockholders. In a system that uses for-profit prisons, the goal is to fill every cell, and then build even more prisons to house moreRead More →

    Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch met with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut on Wednesday, February 8 to talk about very big stuff. After their meeting, Senator Blumenthal was quick to point out that Gorsuch told him that he found president trump’s tweets about a Seattle judge who granted a restraining order against the enforcement of trump’s Muslim ban to be “demoralizing” and “disheartening”. Mainstream media was just as quick to breathlessly trumpet Gorsuch’s comments as a “sign of independence”. Let’s break down why this is bullshit, and why the media (CNN especially) might be so eager to lick that plate of bullshit clean thatRead More →

This appeared on Twitter early this morning: I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017 This seemingly cryptic tweet came as a result, we can only guess, of a piece in The New York Times that suggested that president trump signed the executive order naming Steve Bannon to the National Security Council’s principals committee without reading it. The Times piece suggested that trump was unaware that the order he signed was placing Bannon on the NSC, and that trump was angryRead More →

  “So you’ve been to school for a year or two, and you know you’ve seen it all….” – Dead Kennedys, “Holiday in Cambodia” I was a junior in high school in 1986 when I was walking down the hall one day behind a senior who was wearing what at first glance appeared to be a concert tour shirt. When I got closer to him in the hallway, I saw that it was a…satirical?…shirt that was something along the lines of “Hitler: European Tour 1939-1945” with a list of all the countries he invaded and the dates he invaded them. I remember something about theRead More →