Events

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan tweeted early yesterday the great news about the tax breaks ordinary people are experiencing: Never mind all the Democrats who call the GOP’s tax bill a deficit-busting giveaway to the rich; House Speaker Paul D. Ryan has been enthusiastically promoting it as a middle-class tax windfall. He’s been coaching other Republican lawmakers to sell the $1.5 trillion tax cut to voters, and telling people on Twitter to check their paychecks for wage hikes. The bill — which was...

Confronted with the options that these guys are master strategists or they're not even thinking about their next move, Occam's Razor suggests we're dealing with serious stupidity here: The war between the president and the nation’s law enforcement apparatus is unlike anything America has seen in modern times. With a special counsel investigating whether his campaign collaborated with Russia in 2016 and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in 2017, the president has engaged in a scorched-earth assault on...

Today I plan to take Parker on a decent walk before it gets cold and starts snowing. I'm also working on a couple of minor updates to Weather Now, including looking into creating an API against which I can write a React/Relay front-end. Also I have a lot of reading to catch up on, some of which I may write about. In other words: a quiet Saturday at home.

I am not a parent (apparently). But for my friends who are, there is help:

President Trump told friends that the Nunes memo could help discredit the Mueller investigation, basically proving obstruction of justice. But is it really possible to hold him accountable? And what happens if Mueller gets fired? Amazon distribution centers don't really create a ton of jobs, so why are we subsidizing them? The UK's model of public-private partnerships doesn't work anymore because of the country's austerity. Jackpotting ATMs is a thing, and it has arrived in the US. Fun times, fun times.

Aside: how the hell is it already February? Moving on. Two more articles popped up about Tuesday night's State of the Union speech. First, via Deeply Trivial, Andrea Jones-Rooy at 538 points out that very little of what presidents propose in the SOTU actually gets enacted: From Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, according to [Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard], presidents made an average of 34 proposals in each State of the Union or initial address to a joint session of Congress. The most requests a...

I'm finally reading last night's State of the Union address, and...well...oy, gevalt. The speech doesn't really have a lot of coherence, but SOTU speeches rarely do. Still, there's something about reading it that makes me wonder who Steve Miller actually thought would deliver it. For example, these two passages: All Americans deserve accountability and respect—and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good...

I can't be sure why, but I seem to have some reluctance today to get to the State of the Union address from last night. At some point I'll read it and comment on it. But not yet.

Amazon's bidding process for its second headquarters (HQ2) has given the company a bonanza of information about what 238 cities are willing to give up in order to get a piece of the action, and thus what levers Amazon can pull to get public money for its private gain. Not to mention, the applications gave the company millions of dollars worth of marketing data: Amazon asked every city and state applying for its second headquarters for details about local resources, like available talent and transit...

Diageo, the international beverage behemoth that owns about a quarter of Scotland's distilleries (including Caol Ila and Talisker) is investigating how to produce horrible shite that isn't at all Scotch under its existing brands: First, Diageo is considering creating “scotch whisky infusions,” low-alcohol and/or flavored alcoholic beverages sold under the same name as existing single malt or blended whisky brands. Secondly, Diageo has sought permission from the [Scotch Whisky Association trade group] to...