[ Posted Thursday, February 8th, 2024 – 15:55 UTC ]
Donald Trump is, without doubt, the leader of the Republican Party right now. He is cruising to the Republican presidential nomination and the party's base has rallied around him almost to the exclusion of all others. But below the level of Trump, there is a growing leadership vacuum in the party, as everyone scrambles to bend whichever way the Trump winds happen to be blowing at that particular moment, while still attempting to hold the party together. This lack of secondary leadership came to the fore this week in three notable ways.
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[ Posted Monday, February 5th, 2024 – 16:29 UTC ]
The key aspect of this, again, is: Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?
-- Senator James Lankford
(chief GOP negotiator on the border bill)
As of now, things are looking like that's going to wind up being a "Yes," Senator Lankford. Now that Donald Trump is heavily weighing in against it, it may be completely impossible to pass any sort of border or immigration bill for the rest of this year no matter what it contains. Which would be a huge missed opportunity for Republicans, but they're perfectly content to just endlessly play politics with the issue without ever doing anything to solve the basic problems.
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[ Posted Friday, February 2nd, 2024 – 18:46 UTC ]
New monthly employment numbers were released today showing a surprisingly-high 353,000 new jobs were created in January. The stock market is currently setting new all-time highs. The American economy has recovered from COVID far faster and far better than all other major countries, in fact. Inflation has come back down, gasoline prices are down, and wages are up (growing faster than inflation). Signups for Obamacare hit another record this year (outpacing last year's record by five million!) and America has the lowest uninsured rate in history. Domestic oil production is also setting records. So what are conservatives obsessed with in reaction to all this good news? Taylor Swift. No, really....
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 31st, 2024 – 16:35 UTC ]
House Republicans moved a big step closer to one of their goals today, as they voted on articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Two articles of impeachment passed the relevant House committee on a party-line vote, and the full House could vote on the matter within days. This will fulfill a longstanding desire of the House Republicans to impeach somebody (anybody!) in Joe Biden's administration, and can be seen as a trial run for their real goal of impeaching Biden himself. This is all a purely political exercise, but that's certainly not going to stop them. The Republicans simply have no grounds for impeaching either one, but why let a little thing called the U.S. Constitution get in the way of their fun?
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 30th, 2024 – 17:10 UTC ]
Can the Republican House get anything at all done? That is a rather open question, seeing as how so far they haven't done much -- this has been the least productive Congress in at least the last half-century, maybe even more. And they've already unceremoniously booted out one speaker (which was unprecedented in American history) and they could easily decide to do so again. Which is why the next couple of weeks could be instructive.
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[ Posted Friday, January 26th, 2024 – 19:00 UTC ]
A staggering amount of Republican hypocrisy is now on full display in Washington. Pretty much ever since Joe Biden took office, Republicans have been screaming: "Border crisis! It's a crisis! This crisis needs immediate action!" This has been reinforced in an enormous way by the rightwing media echo chamber, who features the "Border Crisis!" storyline on a nightly basis for its audience. Scary images of border-crossers are shown, the word "invasion" is tossed about willy-nilly, and the fearmongering of immigrants is paramount.
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[ Posted Friday, January 19th, 2024 – 17:54 UTC ]
President Joe Biden got some excellent news today: the "vibecession" seems to be over. For those unfamiliar with this neologism, the term was coined by an educator a while back to explain the disconnect between the economic reality (measured by all the economic indicators) and how people actually felt about the economy. The economy has been doing amazingly well in recovering from the COVID pandemic slump, while at the same time public perception has remained a lot gloomier.
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[ Posted Friday, January 12th, 2024 – 18:50 UTC ]
It is shocking (it always is), but here we are on the brink of the 2024 presidential election cycle's official start. The Iowa caucuses will be held Monday. Most of us, thankfully, will have a few more months to go before being faced with the prospect of going to the polls for our state's primary, when (hopefully) the weather will be a lot better than it is predicted to be in the Hawkeye State three days from now. They may be heading to their polls in the midst of a blizzard, with the temperature forecast to be: "Oh CRAP it is cold!" with windchill factors being as low as: "I can't feel my toes... or my face... just leave me here in this snowbank for the wolves to find...."
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[ Posted Friday, December 29th, 2023 – 19:20 UTC ]
Welcome back to the second of our year-end awards columns! And if you missed it last Friday, go check out [Part 1] as well.
As always, we must begin with a warning for all readers. It's long. Really, really long. Horrendously long. Insanely long. It takes a lot of stamina to read all the way to the end. You have been duly warned! But because it is so long, we certainly don't want to add any more here at the start, so let's just dive in, shall we?
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[ Posted Friday, December 15th, 2023 – 18:40 UTC ]
President Joe Biden now has an official impeachment inquiry investigating him in the Republican-held House of Representatives. It is the most singular such inquiry in American history, since nobody -- not even the people who have been pushing the idea -- can say precisely what crime Biden has supposedly committed. So for now, they're just investigating him for the crime of (take your pick): being Joe Biden. Or being a Democratic president. Or beating Donald Trump. Or (most likely, given the Republican monomania on the idea) being Hunter Biden's father.
None of these things are actual crimes, it bears pointing out. But that simply doesn't matter to the House. They're merrily on their way to impeaching Biden for one reason and one reason alone: because Donald Trump wanted them to. Trump is still miffed (to put it mildly) that he's the only U.S. president to have been impeached not one time but twice. So, as far as he is concerned, Republicans have a duty to turn the tables and impeach the man who beat him at the polls, to try to weaken him for the presidential rematch that is shaping up for next year.
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