Events

Yesterday David Frum wrote that every time the President sends out another outrageous Tweet, he's doing it to distract and divide his opposition. Josh Marshall extends the thought: There’s a pattern: Outrage. Some still remaining levels of shock. Demands for apologies. Demands for denunciations from Republicans and for Democrats to do something. Each of these steps in the process makes sense and is inevitable and right. But taken together there is a Groundhog Day quality to it. It generates a unique...

President Trump's racist tweeting yesterday and continuing to bait the freshman progressives in the House of Representatives is an obvious attempt to split the Democratic Party going into an election year. David Frum worries that it's working: Barred from expressing their rage against Trump through impeachment, progressive Democrats are turning their rage instead upon Pelosi. They blame her for stopping impeachment. They are now attacking her in increasingly racialized terms. After Trump’s own Twitter...

WBEZ's Curious City blog re-posted an bit from 2016 identifying the geographic center of Chicago: Calculating a center point is straightforward for geographers now, according to Todd Schuble, manager of GIS Research for the University of Chicago’s Division of Social Sciences. Modern mapping software can find the center of any boundary automatically, even one as oddly shaped as Chicago. The process involves looking for any spot that a boundary bends, noting the coordinates, and then averaging them. So...

Woe to the, O Land, when thy King is a child. Fully understanding that the President's job is to distract from the actual work of the Republican Party in consolidating wealth and power, sometimes he does something that I really have to acknowledge. Yesterday morning, President Trump Tweeted something that looked a lot like he was telling four members of the House of Representatives—citizens all, three of them born in the US—to "go back where they came from:" “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat...

I had the opportunity yesterday to get some ribs from my favorite vendor at this year's Ribfest. Base Hit BBQ opened their restaurant in March after five years of catering and festival cooking. (They framed their Chicago Defender review.) Their thermostat showed 33°C inside the small two-table eating area, but that isn't why I was sweating. Their hot sauce lives up to its name, and they use a tasty spicy rub on their bones. Excellent quality meat, good smoke flavor, and all chopped up for easy eating...

The New Republic puts President Trump's planned terror campaign this weekend in historical perspective: The Trump administration forecasts its deportation raids not to make them more successful, but to instill fear in disfavored communities and to signal to his supporters that he’s doing just that. Trump constantly strives to slake his base’s unquenchable thirst for harsher policies toward immigrants. I’ve written before on how the border itself, and all the social ills that Trump ascribes to it, acts...

Jennifer Rubin lays out how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has dealt with, and delegated some of the dealing-with, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): If you did not catch it, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, tweeted that the moderate Democrats were “New Southern Democrats. . . hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.” That’s simply outrageous by any measure, especially considering that a healthy number of...

Unlike the Woody Donald Trump thrust into the Court of St James's, the UK's ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch, has been a model of Britain's diplomatic civil service. Even his leaked cables (ask: who benefited from the leaks?) show a certain level of restraint that, as a professional diplomat, he didn't need to show. Contrast that with the behavior of our diplomats overseas, let alone the guy who appointed them: In Berlin, one U.S. ambassador openly undermines the government; another in Amsterdam...

But I will take the time as soon as I get it: Conor Friedersdorf thinks Tucker Carlson "has failed to assimilate." (So do I.) Daniel Drezner says we have "the worst of all possible Iran policies." (So do I.) Author TJ Martinson won't teach at a downstate religious college this coming year because, apparently, someone got around to reading his new novel. (I just put it on my "to be read" list.) Architect Greg Tamborino won an affordable-housing contest with a bungalow that can easily convert into a...

The President's properties have fallen on hard times, thanks mostly to the President's politics and his childrens' incompetence: The PGA Tour pulled out of Doral during the 2016 campaign after the World Golf Championship had trouble finding a sponsor. Cadillac had quit; speculation abounded that no new brand wanted to be associated with a Trump golf course. So the PGA Tour pulled up roots and moved elsewhere: A five-decade tradition of hosting the event at the course, started in 1962, came to an end....