President Donald Trump signaled this weekend that the DACA kids (formerly known as DREAMers) will essentially be on their own, because the effort to pass legislation to address their dire situation is now dead. Of course, that's where things stand today -- by tomorrow, or next week, Trump could take a radically different stance which will contradict his hard tone expressed over Easter weekend. After all, he's certainly done so before.

Throughout it all, Trump's one consistency is a laughable attempt to place the blame for the whole mess on Democrats. This is ridiculous, since Trump himself singlehandedly caused this crisis, and Trump himself has consistently played politics with the issue rather than reaching a concrete deal to move forward. Anyone with two eyes can see this, but Trump continues to insist otherwise in a futile attempt to score political points.

Continue Reading »

By Trumpian standards, this has been a relatively quiet week. After all, the president only fired a single cabinet secretary, and zero high-ranking aides! Plus, Trump hasn't attacked Stormy Daniels on Twitter even once, after her bombshell interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday. For Trump, this shows some newfound restraint.

Of course, everything is relative. Perhaps Trump is hunkering down in a desperate attempt to convince a high-profile lawyer (or even just any lawyer) to join his shrinking legal team. It would be kind of hard to interview new lawyers when you're making news by publicly and personally attacking Stormy Daniels, for obvious reasons. Trump's legal team these days is down to the bare bones, after one lawyer quit last week and his replacement decided at the very last minute that he had "conflicts" and couldn't accept the job after all. Superlawyer Ted Olson also piled on, in an interview explaining why he wasn't exactly rushing to join the Trump White House:

Continue Reading »

Today, we're going to take a trip down the rabbit hole with Schrödinger's (Cheshire?) cat. If that sounds like a mixed-up metaphor, that's because it is. Our fantastical journey starts off as a Charles Dodgson-style syllogism, but since it contains such circular logic it winds up being an Erwin Schrödinger-style thought experiment. Did they or didn't they? Well, until the wave function collapses into a single eigenstate, President Donald Trump's lawyer's lawyer would have us all believe that they both did and didn't, at the same time. The cat is both alive and dead, in other words. While this may be the most obscure and confusing lead paragraph I have ever personally written, such obscurity seems to be almost required these days, to talk about the growing sex scandal (or non-sex scandal) surrounding Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.

While many have heard of the Schrödinger's cat paradox, only students of pure logic are usually familiar with the work of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the field of syllogisms. Here is a sample, in case you've never seen one before:

Continue Reading »

The Trump administration just announced that it will be adding a citizenship question to the main U.S. Census form that all United States residents will be getting in 2020. Already, several states have sued to block this move, since it could obviously lead to undercounting the actual population. The Justice Department is attempting to claim that the data is necessary to uphold voting rights, but it strains credulity to picture Jeff Sessions being suddenly concerned about upholding federal voting laws, given his history on civil rights. The Census Bureau is trying to put itself on the side of the angels as well, insisting that individual data would never be turned over to law enforcement agencies so that undocumented immigrants could be rounded up. But their hands aren't exactly historically clean either, which is why it's tough to make the case that anyone refusing to answer the citizenship question on their Census form is somehow being overly paranoid.

Continue Reading »

Rumors are swirling inside the Beltway that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may not be around for very much longer. If this seems too good to be true for Democrats, well, it's because it likely is -- at least for the time being. But there's more than one way to skin this particular cat. So let's take a look at all the various ways Paul Ryan could exit both his current leadership position and his House seat, just for fun.

Steps down as speaker

This is the mildest of the possibilities. Paul Ryan could decide that while he's had enough of trying to keep his own caucus together and is therefore stepping down as speaker, he still wants to stay in Congress. This is historically rare, since it is a big step down in the power structure. Usually leaders leave Congress altogether rather than be demoted to just one vote out of 435. However, Ryan would likely be given just about any committee chair he expressed interest in by the incoming speaker, out of sheer gratitude. So he'd likely be heading one of the powerful budget committees, which is what he did before he took on the speakership.

Continue Reading »

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School staged an incredibly successful rally in Washington this weekend, as hundreds of thousands of students, parents, teachers, and other concerned citizens marched to demand stricter gun control laws. It was an impressive feat, since in general high school students are not normally expected to organize anything more complicated than the school yearbook or the prom. I personally could not imagine my former self (at that age) joining together with other students to create such a massive event in a little over one month's time. So the students deserve a whole lot of credit for pulling it off in such spectacular fashion. But the biggest question overhanging the success of the march was whether it will actually change anything or not in the politics of gun control legislation.

There is some cause for cautious optimism, although it has to be said that the odds are against the students achieving real and lasting change. The optimistic part comes from something often heard in relation to the students' effort: "This time feels different." The students are leading the charge, which means the gun control effort has been transformed into a youth movement. This is why so many comparisons are being made to the Vietnam era anti-war marches. But will even having literal poster children in charge change anything, in the end? This remains to be seen.

Continue Reading »

Add this week in Congress to the enormous mountain of steaming Republican hypocrisy, we suppose. Remember back when Republicans got their knickers in such a big twist over Democrats passing lengthy bills without adequate time for congressmen to understand? When the Affordable Care Act passed, some Republicans even chanted "Read the bill!" in protest during the vote. Those were the days, eh? When Republicans retook Congress, they did so in part on a promise that every bill would have a 72-hour period between when it was released publicly and when the vote would happen, in both chambers of Congress. That statement, as they say in Washington, is no longer operative. The Republican-led Congress just passed a 2,200-plus page omnibus budget bill mere hours after the text was released (the House voted 17 hours after the bill was filed, which fell 55 hours short of their promise). Neither the House nor the Senate got anywhere near three days to read the bill. Which is one more big dump on top of the rest of "GOP Hypocrisy Mountain," raising it to new malodorous heights.

Continue Reading »

President Trump's White House made two announcements on tariffs today, which was likely not a coincidence. The big announcement was that Trump will be levying new tariffs on $60 billion of Chinese goods. Specifics will follow, within a few weeks. The timing of this may have been intentional, because the Trump administration also revealed today that the steel and aluminum tariffs aren't going to be anywhere near as tough as Trump initially stated. If the idea was for one bit of tariff news to hide the other, this largely seems to have worked. However, the big tariff news caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to react by plummeting 700 points.

Continue Reading »

Although it hasn't gotten a whole lot of media attention yet, this is another one of those weeks when Congress actually does something, because they are forced to. A handful of times each year, Congress runs up against a calendar deadline (usually one of their own making), and is thus forced to pass a bill or else (choose one): the federal government will shut down, the country will default on the national debt, some large group of people will be royally screwed by congressional inaction, or (the worst of them all, to congresscritters) one of the enormous number of congressional vacation weeks will be in peril of being delayed or cancelled.

This time around, Congress is facing yet another possible government shutdown, as a gargantuan omnibus budget bill is being haggled over which will fund the government all the way through the midterm elections. Since this is going to be the last such "must-pass" bill until then, all sorts of other issues are being negotiated -- which is really just a frank admission that Congress is not expecting to do anything at all until after November. March isn't even over yet, and Congress is wrapping things up until Thanksgiving, to put this another way. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

Continue Reading »

Two completely unrelated court actions are in the news today. There is no real common thread between the two, other than that they both involve state court actions and that both have rather large political overtones. So just to warn you up front, there won't be any sweeping conclusion at the end that ties the two cases together in any way (fair warning).

Pennsylvania's redistricting

The final nail in the coffin (the one containing the old Republican-gerrymandered district map of Pennsylvania) was hammered in today, when the United States Supreme Court declined to review a decision by the Pennsylvania supreme court. This was the expected outcome, but it is still significant.

Continue Reading »