Events

We haven't gotten 25mm of snow in Chicago since December 19th, and the forecast for the next week is precipitation-free—57 days of snow-free weather so far. The record is 83, which we'll break if we don't get that much snow before March 12th. This is unlikely most years, but this year, the climate predictions look promising. Stay tuned. We could always get a blizzard. It's February, after all.

Quick hits: This week's "What Just Happened?" column from Alex Shepherd is a must-read. And by the way, as I've been saying, the president has done everything he promised. Why is anyone surprised? Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed a high-speed rail link between O'Hare and downtown. And soon, the weekend...

Not exactly a slow news day: Former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions won confirmation as Attorney General of the U.S. on a 52-47 party-line vote. Meanwhile, the Senate told Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to sit down and shut up, but "she persisted," thus beginning her 2020 presidential campaign. And though the event was almost 26 full hours ago, yesterday's appeals court hearing in California resulted in a Trump tweet being rebuked by the President's own nominee for the Supreme Court. (The BBC has...

Betsy DeVos was just confirmed as Secretary of Education by one vote: the vice president's tie-breaker. This has never happened before in the history of the United States. So far, all of President Trump's nominees requiring confirmation have had roll-call votes, and the rest are likely to. This also has never happened before: She is only the latest of Trump’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominees to face an unusual amount of opposition in the Senate. Newly elected presidents are typically afforded wide...

Stuff I'll read before rehearsal today: Senior administration officials are re-thinking their strategy after doing almost nothing correctly in their first two weeks. The "bucket with no bottom" that is the West Wing continues to leak in historical proportions. The Republican Party has been bullshitting the American public, and now it's even more obvious. The Speaker of the UK House of Commons has forbidden President Trump from speaking at Westminster Palace. We've had almost no snow since December 19th...

New Republic has the update. tl;dr: Each week is worse than the one before.

Five U.S. representatives out of Illinois' 20-member Congressional delegation are trying real hard to support President Trump's ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and still sound like Americans. Peter Roskam (R-6th), Mike Bost (R-12th), Rodney Davis (R-13th), and John Shimkus (R-15th) have all made statements NPR says "support" the ban; Adam Kinzinger (R-16th) is "unclear." All but Roskam represent large rural districts where you can probably count the Muslims on one hand. Roskam, who represents the...

Welcome to February, in which I hope to increase my pathetic blogging rate (currently 1.23 per day for the last 12 months). Of course, even taking a day off to catch up on things doesn't seem to be helping, because I have all of these articles to read: How did Big Data help Trump win? How do you talk to dogs? How can we prevent seeing the Trump Administration as normal? How does Sam Harris analyze the Muslim ban? How can the Internet of Things work securely? How is the Trump Administration ginning up a...

The fallout from Friday's executive order halting some immigration continues to rain down on Washington, and no one has emerged unscathed. Medium still thinks it's the beginning of an executive-branch coup against the rest of the U.S. government, and that Bannon on the NSC is the real news. They have some good points, but for now I'm going to go with Brian Beutler's analysis: it's incompetence, not (entirely) malice: The early days of Trump’s presidency, and the humiliating rollout of the anti-refugee...

Writing for Medium, Yonatan Zunger thinks the insanity the administration unleashed over the weekend might have been a trial balloon for a coup: First, the decision to first block, and then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively...