During his campaign, Donald Trump set up a policy shop to study and recommend policies consistent with his own views and general conservative positions. (To save conservatives time, those aren’t the same thing.) Many candidates do something similar. Unfortunately, Trump’s shop fell apart before the election, the result of bad management and a failure to pay people.
This clip from Samantha Bee’s program (originally broadcast election day, I think) makes fun of the failure, but there’s a serious underlying point, and it helps explain why Trump’s first month in office hasn’t been the success liberals were afraid it might be.
(Usual warning for those with sensitive ears: This is a cable show, and the language isn’t exactly safe for viewing in Sunday school.)
OK, this isn’t really Trump’s self-assessment. It’s a set of his attacks on President Obama for doing the same sort of things Trump himself has been doing (except more so) since taking office, as compiled by the staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Blogger Steve Benen offers more examples here. For instance, Trump blasted Obama for taking a few trips on Air Force One to Hawaii, a nice place to visit but also where he was born and spent most of his youth. A little over a year ago Trump implied he’d hardly take any trips at all as president, saying, “I’d want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”
In fact, Trump flew Air Force One to his commercial resort in Palm Beach, Florida, three of his first four weekends in office. To be fair, he got some work while there (as Obama also did on his less-frequent travels), but he got in some golf as well. There’s nothing wrong with this. The presidency is a high-pressure job and presidents need to unwind. But it makes his remarks about Obama look pretty hypocritical.
Incidentally, one reason for Trump’s frequent trips may be that his regular presence is a selling point for his club. Mar-a-Lago has just doubled its membership initiation fee to $200,000 plus tax. To be fair, the initiation fee had been $200,000 in the past as well, but was cut to $100,000 in 2012 when the number of new memberships reportedly fell off. As far as I know, profiting from the presidency this way appears to be legal, but a lot of authorities on government ethics find it objectionable.
Back during the campaign Trump also complained about the cost of President Obama’s travels, but Trump’s whole family has been costing federal, state, and local governments a lot of money, way more than for previous presidents it appears. It’s still a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, and again I’m not objecting to it, just pointing out the obvious hypocrisy.
On this day in 1895 the great orator and author Frederick Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington DC. He was a powerful advocate for equal rights for all, including voting rights for women, and he was invited onto he platform and given a standing ovation. A little later that day, shortly after returning home, he died suddenly, probably from a massive heart attack or stroke. He was 77.
On February 1 this year, speaking on the first day of Black History Month, President Donald Trump, looking at a piece of paper apparently listing names of major figures in black history, said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more I notice.”
It’s worth seeing just how he said this and how his press secretary later responded to a straightforward question asking what Trump specifically had in mind. Seth Meyers has clips of both in the following video. The section in question runs from 1 minute to 2 minutes 30 seconds (though the whole video is worth seeing).
Some people find it hilarious; I find it pretty bizarre that Trump and Spicer both seem clueless who Douglass was and seem to think he’s still alive.
If you by chance work in the Trump White House, here’s the short version: Born into slavery in 1818, Douglass largely taught himself to read and write and in his teens tried to teach other slaves with the tacit permission of the plantation owner until other slaveholders in the area put a stop to it. At the age of 20 Douglass escaped to the North where her married and in a few years was recognized for his oratory. He spoke and wrote extensively on slavery, counseled President Lincoln, campaigned for women’s suffrage and the rights of American Indians and everyone, advocated dialog and cooperation even with slaveowners, and held public office. He was one of the greatest Americans.
Conservative Republican Congressman Will Hurd represents a Texas district that includes about 800 miles of the Mexican border — about 40 percent of the whole thing — and he calls Trump’s proposed wall “the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border” and even “impossible to build” in some places.
(Even trying to build it would create huge problems for some of his constituents. It’s been widely noted that the wall would require seizing a lot of private land.)
The facts have not changed. Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border. Each section of the border faces unique geographical, cultural, and technological challenges that would be best addressed with a flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers the agents on the ground with the resources they need. A wall may be an effective tool in densely populated areas, but a variety of tools are needed between Brownsville, Texas and San Diego, California. The 23rd District of Texas, which I represent, has over 800 miles of the border, more than any other Member of Congress, and it is impossible to build a physical wall in much of its terrain. Big Bend National Park and many areas in my district are perfect examples of where a wall is unnecessary and would negatively impact the environment, private property rights, and economy. There is no question that we must secure our border, but we need an intelligence-led approach in order to effectively combat the 19 criminal organizations currently operating in Mexico.
Bill Maher, who used to have a show called Politically Incorrect, here takes on the excesses of so-called political correctness. (The usual warning to applies for those with sensitive ears: This is a cable program, and it’s also Bill Maher.)
I think he makes a lot of good points, though I would add that it’s not just the Left that gets outraged over deviations from what they deem politically correct. Consider Bill O’Reilly’s annual hissy about people saying “Happy Holidays,” or the right-wing claims that Obama didn’t refer to “American exceptionalism” often enough. (This despite the fact that Obama is apparently the only president to have used the term “American exceptionalism in a speech.)
But I don’t happen to agree with everything Maher says. For one thing, the term “political correctness” is quite often used for what the rest of us would consider not being a jerk. I don’t think it’s mere “political correctness” to object to mocking a handicapped person or using racial or sexual slurs intentionally to cause offense and pain.
For another, while it’s a minor matter given everything else going on, the name “Washington Redskins” really is pretty obviously racist. I have no particular problem with the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves, or the Cleveland Indians (though their Chief Wahoo logo is pretty stupid). But it’s harder to see “Redskins” as benign. Maher refers to a Washington Post poll that found 90 percent of American Indians surveyed had no objection to the team name, but the poll has been questioned, in part because of the loose criteria for inclusion. See Jacqueline Keeler’s May 24 article in The Nation, for example, or this piece by Nidhi Prakash. Besides, you don’t have to be an American Indian to have a right to an opinion. The name offends me.
The Pew Charitable Trusts and the MacArthur Foundation have been jointly examining how states make use of evidence-based policies, and on January 26 the released a report. The full 47-page document can be viewed as a PDF, or you can read a shorter summary on this web page.
They concluded that five states — Washington, Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Oregon in that order — lead the nation in basing their policies on evidence of what actually works. Interestingly, these states cover the political spectrum, though Utah is the only deep-red state on the list.
The seven states at the bottom of the list are (in alphabetical order) Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
The rankings don’t necessarily indicate the best- and worst-governed states, but it seems reasonable to suppose that other things being equal, it’s better to base policies on evidence than on pure ideology or random guessing. Then again, the best way to get evidence on new approaches may be to try them out before there’s a lot of evidence to support or discredit them. Anyway, it’s an interesting subject.
You can read more on the general subject in the referenced report and summary and elsewhere on the Pew Trusts website.
Astronomer and blogger Phil Plait has a good summary of climate concerns here.
As he notes, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the independent research group Berkeley Earth all concur that the year 2016 was the warmest on record for the Earth’s mean surface temperature, breaking the records previously set in 2015 and before than in 2014. In fact, 15 of the hottest 16 years have occurred since 2000, and the previous record in 1998 wasn’t that long before.
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