Events

The New York Times yesterday published a chilling description of how Venezuela's democracy sputtered and died: Venezuela, by the numbers, resembles a country hit by civil war. Its economy, once Latin America’s richest, is estimated to have shrunk by 10 percent in 2016, more than Syria’s. Its inflation that year has been estimated as high as 720 percent, nearly double that of second-ranked South Sudan, rendering its currency nearly worthless. In a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves...

Just, I dunno, man. Did the president blab to the Russian Foreign Minister what our intelligence capabilities are? In front of TASS, no less? How about the Troglodyte General reversing the Obama Administration's efforts to target only violent drug offenders instead of corner boys? And the Grand Old Party abetting this nonsense? Or how to understand the Comey firing? Sleep is overrated.

A fossil found in a mine in Alberta six years ago is one of the best-preserved dinosaur specimens ever discovered: On March 21, 2011, Shawn Funk was digging in Alberta’s Millennium Mine with a mechanical backhoe, when he hit “something much harder than the surrounding rock.” A closer look revealed something that looked like no rock Funk had ever seen, just “row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.” What he had found was a 2,500-pound dinosaur fossil, which was soon shipped...

Laura Reston at New Republic has a good piece on how the Soviets Russian government is doubling down on its disinformation campaign against Western democracies: One of the most recent battles in the propaganda war took place on January 4, less than a week after President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election. The Donbass International News Agency, a small wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short article online headlined “MASSIVE NATO...

With no one who can read written words believing that the official reason for former FBI Director James Comey's firing is true, the Washington Post has three germaine articles today on the subject: "Inside Trump's anger and impatience" "Why Trump expected only applause when he told Comey, ‘You’re fired.’" And Trump's poll numbers were 36 approve, 58 disapprove before this news hit. The last story has this nugget: Interestingly, the reason the numbers have ticked down appears to be the group that elected...

I was waiting with bated breath to see how Scott Adams would spin last night's Watergate moment into yet another example of the masterful persuasion techniques of President Trump. Like Baghdad Bob standing on the hotel roof, he did not disappoint: Democrats and the Opposition Media reflexively oppose almost everything President Trump does. This time he gave them something they wanted, badly, but not for the reason they wanted. That’s a trigger. It forces anti-Trumpers to act angry in public that he did...

I'll get to Eddie Lampert's interview with the Chicago Tribune later today. But first, let's take a moment to realize that as we shake our heads at the amateur hour over at the White House, we knew damn well they were going to cause a Constitutional crisis at some point. And that point arrived last night: President Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, abruptly terminating the top official leading a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s advisers colluded with the...

Despite his initial skepticism, Crain's Greg Hinz sees the value: Ponder for a moment what $200 million can accomplish, even in government, and even at a time when money isn't worth what it used to be. Two hundred million dollars would pretty much fill the hole in the Chicago Public Schools budget, the one that had officials threatening to end school three weeks early. Two hundred million dollars would completely pay for the budget of the city Department of Streets & Sanitation for a year (with $50...

Nate Silver has compared pundit analyses of poll data to actual voting results and determined that the pundits get things consistently wrong and in the wrong direction: This French election was part of a pattern that I began to notice two years ago in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Take the 2012 U.S. presidential election as an example. Most of the mainstream media concluded that the race was too close to call, despite a modest but fairly robust Electoral College lead for...

Via TPM, U.S. Representative Rod Blum (R-IA) walked out of an interview about a minute after it began. Seems a little petulant to me. Could it have anything to do with his vote Friday to repeal Obamacare and his consitutents' reactions?