There is a lot happening in Charlottesville today and yesterday. A group of white nationalists has come to town to protest. I hope it’s obvious to anybody who knows me that this upsets me. But I’m missing some key data. These are things that might be known to somebody, but not me. Forgive the stream of consciousness, but here goes nothing.
FoxNews.com has a headline story about Trump’s jump in approval. And here is another in the series (see here, and here, and here) about why you should be angry if you get your news from FoxNews: They wrote a headline based on a single poll, from a polling organization that is known to be republican leaning, and there is NOT A JUMP in his numbers when you compare the most recent Rasmussen data with the last poll they reported. In fact, the President’s approval rating is EXACTLY the same as it was in the last Rasmussen poll. Other polls, including one from Gallup that’s as recent as the Rasmussen poll, have his approval where it was before, in the mid-high 30s.
There’s a new poll out that brought things around to a recurring theme: trust. I wrote a little about this before, but not as much as I think about it. Whether we trust or don’t trust a politician, a candidate, a boss, seems to have so much influence on how nearly everything that person does is colored. Today we’re seeing trust have an enormous impact on how we view President Trump. His approval ratings continue to dip into the 30s, but perhaps more important, a CNN poll found that only 24% of Americans say that they trust “all or most of what they hear in official communications from the White House.”
If I had to place a bet on the next election (and the ability of Trump to survive his first term), I’d bet that Trump not only survives his first term, but also gets elected to a second term. I’ve been wrong lots of times before, and I hope I’m wrong about this — maybe just about the second term part, but more on that later. The only chance I see of any kind of impeachment or removal from office would be after a full democratic sweep of Congress, and I don’t see that happening. The seats up for election in the Senate grossly favor republicans, and the House districts have been so cleanly carved up that I think it will be hard, if not impossible, to win back the House in 2018. But it looks like there’s some division growing in GOP land. We’ve seen this from pundits and strategists, but we’ve seen far less of it from elected officials, until now.
As before, a blatantly stolen idea, but this is a pretty good view.
This is the fourth of a series dissecting the timeline of Trump-Russia connections that’s kept at Bill Moyers’s website. For a bit of intro, and the first subthread click here. This one is all cut and pasted, with the links included. None of the text is my own, not even paraphrased.
This is all about a man named Felix Sater, who I think we should get to know a bit. Follow past the jump for this one.
Continue reading “Timelines and subthreads (part 4: Who is Felix Sater?)”
This is the third of a series dissecting the timeline of Trump-Russia connections that’s kept at Bill Moyers’s website. For a bit of intro, and the first subthread , click here. This one is all cut and pasted, with the links included. None of the text is my own, not even paraphrased.
Paul Manafort seems to be a pretty central figure here, so I thought it was worth a search for his name in the timeline. Follow past the jump for this one.
Continue reading “Timelines and subthreads (part 3: All about Manafort)”
This is the second of a series dissecting the timeline of Trump-Russia connections that’s kept at Bill Moyers’s website. For a bit of intro, and the first subthread, click here. Some text is copied and pasted directly from the timeline, other text is paraphrased.
I found this one interesting, even though I can’t say that I was paying too much attention to it at the time. One thing to keep in mind is that these exchanges were all happening after the June 9 meeting between Trump Jr and Veselnitskaya, and after the April 2016 DNC hack. There’s a fair amount of mingling with this thread and Paul Manafort, but I’ll take on the Manafort stuff in another thread. Follow past the jump for the timeline.
Continue reading “Timelines and subthreads (part 2: GOP platform on Russia and Ukraine)”
Steven Harper has assembled a very useful and impressive timeline of all the connections between Trump and Russia. It’s posted here, and updated regularly. As impressive as I find it, the problem with it is that it’s a series of overlapping timelines, rather than one single timeline. A way to sort it by a specific topic would be helpful, and certainly possible electronically. I hope they will do this in the future. For now, there are a couple of subthreads that I found particularly interesting to follow, and worth putting together here. I’m sure more will be added to these in the future. If I’m moved to update, I’ll do it in a separate post to preserve the sense of what we know now. I’m also going to keep the subthreads in separate posts so they don’t get buried under each other. Some text is copied and pasted directly from the timeline, other text is paraphrased.
The Trump Jr email/meeting timeline is below, and others will follow:
Subthread 2: Trump campaign and the GOP platform position on Russia and Ukraine.
Subthread 3: all about Manafort
Subthread 4: who is Felix Sater?
Continue reading “Timelines and subthreads (part 1: Trump Jr emails and meetings)”
There are some things that I tend to say over and over. One of them is about the options, as I see them, when it comes to offering social services to a society. There is always going to be a group of people who we can agree are deserving of these services, and a group of people who take advantage of the services and get something they don’t deserve. In an ideal world, we will only give coverage to those who deserve it, and not one undeserving person will get benefits. This will reduce the costs to the lowest possible, because there is no waste in the system. Because the ideal never seems to be possible in an imperfect world, we have to pick which way we want to err. Do we want a system that covers the most people, or the fewest. The system that covers the most costs more, but makes sure that all the “deserving” get what they need, while unfortunately letting some of the “undeserving” take advantage of the system. The system that covers the fewest saves money, by making sure that no “undeserving” get help they need, but leaves some “deserving” without help they need. Of course we can also debate who is “deserving” and who isn’t, but that’s a separate issue (not unimportant, just separate). Nevertheless, the whole purpose of this post is to have a place for a graphic that I created to illustrate this. It’s rough, and I spent less than 10 minutes creating it, but here it is. Sharing is welcome, but it would be nice if a link to this post came with it.
Hitting Bregma 