Tired of waiting for the weekend, when Trump routinely slips his restraints and takes to the Twitter machine, for your expected dose of crazy? You’re in luck. A New York Times reporter hit on the tactic of hanging out at his golf course and buttonholing the chatterbox-in-chief for an impromptu half-hour yap flap. The highlight was his insistence — 16 times — that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia, but the whole thing is yet more evidence of his state of mental collapse.
With all due respect to the people who get paid to write such things, the media is still missing the biggest story of 2017 — or, more accurately, nobody has the guts to run with it: The president is functionally incapacitated, no better able to conduct the affairs of state than Woodrow Wilson post-stroke, and the Republican Party is complicit in keeping this charade going. This is the elephant in the room that the party of the elephant is ignoring: A bill will come due for this someday. Or, to quote the bard, the truth will out.
Or maybe it won’t. I like to collect evidence of how much influence propaganda has on the conservative mind, and Trump has given us another quick-and-dirty data point: Nearly half of Republicans believe Trump’s claim that he repealed Obamacare, which is news to those of us who are on it.
Since Delaware Republicans have been so slavishly devoted to Trump, perhaps someone should ask them for their reaction to Delaware’s likely revenue loss from the Trump tax bill.
Before Oprah Winfrey can run for president, she’ll have to answer for Dr. Phil, who rose to fame thanks to her. Let’s see if his impending fall splashes any mud on her, because this report on his show’s practices should end his career. The banner accusation comes from an alcoholic, who was put in a dressing room with a bottle of vodka so that he’d be drunk on the air.
Traffic deaths in the U.S. once topped 50,000 a year, but stronger safety features (thanks, air bags!) and tougher drunk-driving laws have been shrinking the mortality rolls for decades — until last year, when, for the second year in a row, deaths shot higher. You don’t have to look far to find the culprit: those ever-present smart phones that people can’t keep their eyes off. Yet another reason that driverless vehicles are coming sooner than you think.
Remember how our erstwhile friends liked to tell Bernie Sanders’ supporters that by criticizing Hillary Clinton they were doing the work of her enemies? They meant that literallty –Russian troll farms actually invented fake reporters for left-leaning web sites.
Given that story, and the folly of trying to sort truth from fiction where Russian sources are involved, take this “confession” by a Russian hacker that he did the work on Kremlin orders for what it’s worth.
From the Here’s Why We Science file: Coyotes increasingly live in cities, and lots of people think hunting them will help solve the problem — after all, common sense says more dead coyotes equals fewer live ones. Not so, empirical evidence shows: Hunting coyotes breaks up packs and scatters individuals, who then form new packs and bear larger litters. In short, hunting increases the coyote population. This is why saying “it’s just common sense” shows a lack of common sense.
From the Wahmbulance Emergency File: U2 lead singer Bono, in an interview with Rolling Stone, opined that popular music today is “too girly.” It doesn’t sound quite as bad in context — he was trying to make a point of debatable merit about young male rage — but the feminists of Twitter showed him that female domination of the popular music charts doesn’t equal a lack of anger and energy in popular culture.