Mr. Trump’s presidency has delivered what those voters wanted on policy, the economy and the judiciary. But exit polls and Tuesday’s suburban results suggest he hasn’t delivered what many of them want in a presidential persona.
Category Archives: Culture
Happy New Year Data
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Electronic Frontiers Foundation took a look back at 2018 data privacy scandals.
The Marriott hack that stole data from up to 500 million visitors made the cut. But the report says the really bad actors “were the tech companies themselves, harvesting of mountains of users’ data and employing flawed systems to use and share it.”
Sports Illustrated Too
Christine Blasey Ford Presents Award
The publisher of the popular Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue gave its Inspiration of the Year award to Rachael Denhollander. Rachel was the first to accuse Dr. Larry Nasser of sexually abusing her as a young gymnast under his care. And over 150 other other victims came forward to corroborate her story.
Here testimony put Dr. Nasser in prison for 175 years. And his employer, Michigan State University, paid $500 million in settlements to 332 victims. Vox has has an in depth story of what happened here.
Christine Blasey Ford Presents Award
Christine Blasey Ford made a video presentation of the award. She claims to be a victim too. She accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of molesting her at a high school party. But no one corroborated her story. Nor could she remember when or where the alleged assault happened or how she got there or got home.
Judge Kavanaugh was put on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nuke Global Warming
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Time’s running out according the latest government climate change report. The Fourth National Climate Assessment says global warming will shrink the economy 10% by the end of the century.
But Bjorn Lomborg says it’s not all that bad. His worst case scenario would only cause a 5% hit to the economy.
Deadly Global Warming
Oh wait, that’s not the real worst case scenario. In 2017 the Daily Mail said there’s a 5% chance climate change will kill every last one of us by 2021.
Anyway, it seems like people who take these reports seriously might also take nuclear power seriously as a solution. This Scientific American article says we can nuke our way out of global warming.
Obama Judges Trump Judges
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U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled against President Trump on an immigration matter. So Trump called him an Obama judge. And that prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to publicly rebuke the President, explaining, “there are no Obama judges or Trump or Bush or Clinton judges.”
Obama Judges
Mark Thiessen thinks jumping into a political argument is a funny way for Justice Roberts to show he’s above politics.
You may have noticed Trump doesn’t claim to be above politics. So he counterpunched that judges are a threat to national security.
Go here to see a president publicly rebuke the Supreme Court.
Democrat’s Suburban Shift
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David Montgomery at CityLab has a killer map showing suburban congressional districts represented by Democrats. They’re a big chunk of the country. And he says almost all of the 33 seats Democrats picked up on Tuesday were in suburban districts:
Democrats retook the House of Representatives on the back of a suburban surge Tuesday, remaking a once rock-ribbed Republican bastion into a Democratic stronghold.
Though some districts remained undecided Wednesday afternoon, Democrats had picked up at least 33 seats in Congress, almost all of them predominantly suburban. These suburban districts, once closely divided, are now twice as likely to be represented by a Democrat than by a Republican. Democrats even lost some seats in rural areas, but picked up at least 22 seats that CityLab’s Congressional Density Indexclassifies as “sparse suburban” or “dense suburban.” Add that to Democrat gains in almost all of the remaining Republican-held districts with major urban populations and you have a new, blue majority.
Suburban Shift
Here’s what some others have to say about the Democrat’s suburban shift.
The reality is that Mr. Trump’s 2016 “base” included many traditional, suburban Republicans. Some voted for him, some against Hillary Clinton and some for a conservative Supreme Court majority.
Democrats have won back control of the House of Representatives, slicing through Republican-held suburbs where President Donald Trump has proven toxic to undo a Republican majority once thought to be impervious until the next round of redistricting.
And Trump should be terrified that Democrat Stacey Abrams won 56% of Gwinnett County, with 920,000 people the largest suburban county in Georgia, in the state’s still-undecided governor’s race. Gwinnett rarely if ever voted Democratic for president before Hillary Clinton, who won 51%, and has grown by 115,000 people since 2010. Nearby Cobb County,with 755,000 people and Newt Gingrich’s old geographic base, gave Abrams almost 54%.
