Infrastructure, anyone?

If Trump had any real political sense for governing he would be standing at the Oroville dam right now announcing a proposal for a huge infrastructure and jobs bill. After all, that is the kind of talk that won him the White House. A few more missed opportunities like this one and people will start to realize that he never really meant it.

Was “Never Trump” right?

Remember back during the primaries when the “Never Trump” movement emerged? It was on the Republican side, and consisted largely of Republicans with government experience in foreign policy. Their main objection was that Trump did not have the temperament to be the leader of the free world. After the Mar-a-Lago on Facebook incident, where dinner guests posted pictures of Trump and aides responding to North...

Trump disappoints

There were opportunities in the Trump election that gave a few glimmers of hope. I thought his victory speech was really gracious. Unfortunately things went downhill from there. There were things in his platform that could garner a lot of centrist support. He could have started there and built up support. Of course things would have been more to the right than many people like me would have preferred, but he could have...

An odd way to defend Republicans

I’ve noticed on Facebook that some people are taking an ingenious approach to defending Trump and the Republicans: pointing out that it was the Republican party that presided over the abolition of slavery, and was generally more supportive of women’s right to vote. This is a nice slight of hand that appears to work mainly because people don’t know much history. “What happened to the Republican...

Dictator moves

Thought for the day: So Trump is pulling all these classic dictator moves (denouncing the courts, the press, anyone who displeases him, etc). And therefore some people see him as an evil genius, or at least some sort of idiot savant. But what if all these “classic dictator moves”, far from being some difficult-to-execute strategy requiring focus and discipline, are just where people end up when they lack some...

Second order consequences of “religious free...

There will likely be many largely unforeseen unintended consequences that will result from the implementation of “religious freedom” bills that allow individuals to opt out of various rules and regulations that would otherwise apply. Once religion is thus privileged, I predict the founding of several new religions in order to obtain privileges that would otherwise be denied. Founding a religion is not actually...

Craigslist and false flag operations

So my Senator (Cory Gardner, R-CO) went on TV to complain about all the calls that are flooding his office complaining about, well all the things that have Coloradans upset. Many of them, he claims, are from paid out-of-state activists. He’s seen the Craigslist ads. Of course I called both his offices to let him know that I am a constituent and not at all paid, and the reason I’ve been calling so much has...

Situational Patriotism

Term of the day: “Situational Patriotism”. Explains why the Republican clamor about the Constitution only comes out when they don’t like what a Democrat does. The stunning silence on Trump is telling. Most Republican politicians seem scared to even intimate there might be issues with Trump, much less to name them. That is tribalism over country.