Events

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...

Corollaries to what we're seeing: President Trump, very likely, has narcissistic personality disorder. He's almost a textbook case of it, in fact. Remember, also, that Vice President Pence is a dangerous radical. And if you're outside the U.S., remember that most of us voted against these clowns. But hey, there's always Nazi-punching. We will now resume the terror.

By now, everyone in the world has heard about President Trump's patently unconstitutional order to ban refugees from some majority-Muslim nations (except, coincidentally, not from those with which he has business dealings). But after his first Take Out the Trash Day, he did something a lot more far-reaching and dangerous yesterday: President Donald Trump is reshuffling the US National Security Council (NSC), downgrading the military chiefs of staff and giving a regular seat to his chief strategist Steve...

After seeing ABC's interview of the President, Charlie Pierce hadn't "been this horrified since JFK told us about the Cuban Missile Crisis:" Holy mother of god. The only demonstrable difference between Muir's conversation with Donald Trump and Katie Couric's legendary encounter with Sarah Palin is that Trump actually is the President* of the United States. He actually has the nuclear codes. He actually is enacting actual policies that will affect actual people. He actually did happen to the oldest...

I was going to post about Bruce Schneier's observation that President Trump continuing to use his personal Android phone was a huge security risk simply because it has a microphone that can be triggered remotely. But then, just this morning, the Washington Post confirmed that the entire senior management of the State Department abruptly resigned: [S]uddenly on Wednesday afternoon, [the State Department’s undersecretary for management, Patrick] Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned...