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Category Archives: Irony

bizarre and ironic

The Founding Tweets

For 29 years, NPR has read aloud the Declaration of Independence on Independence Day, but this year they did something new, and apropos. They tweeted the entire text of the DoI, 140 characters at a time. That took 113 posts. It went about as well as might be expected. Many people who tuned in late […]

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Is There a Solution?

© Tom Tomorrow The Republican health care bill is wildly unpopular with Americans. There have been two recent polls: in one 16% approve to 58% disapprove. The other shows only 12% approve, while 53% of Americans want the Republicans to either leave Obamacare alone or fix any problems it might have. So if Trump repeals […]

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Obama on Health Care Repeal

[This was posted to Facebook yesterday by Barack Obama.] Our politics are divided. They have been for a long time. And while I know that division makes it difficult to listen to Americans with whom we disagree, that’s what we need to do today. I recognize that repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has […]

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Trump Embarrassed?

Yesterday, Donald Trump finally admitted that he didn’t make any recordings of his conversations with James Comey. This was an issue because Trump tried to threaten Comey by implicating that there might be such recordings. So there are two questions. First, why did Trump wait until yesterday? When Congress asked whether such recordings exist, why […]

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Promising the Moon

© Tom Toles The Republicans are still trying to repeal Obamacare. It is ironic that back when Obama was president, the Republicans didn’t have any problem passing bills to repeal the ACA, because they knew that Obama would veto them. But now, even though they control both houses of Congress and the presidency, they can’t […]

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The Trump Kleptocracy

Donald Trump wants to slash funding for government programs that provide housing for the poor and combat homelessness. Well, with a bigly exception. The government is proposing to leave intact a housing subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords. Including Trump and his siblings. When Fred Trump died, he left an interest in the […]

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The Privatized State of America

© Brian Mcfadden With all the scandals swirling around Donald Trump, did anyone notice that the Senate is again attempting to repeal Obamacare? And speaking of Trump and Republican efforts to erase everything that Obama accomplished, Trump also rolled back Obama’s changes to the relationship between the US and Cuba, making it harder for US […]

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A Closer Look at Kansas

Business Insider has a detailed analysis of Kansas’s Grand Conservative Experiment of reducing the size of their government by cutting taxes and cutting government. They did something interesting in that they analyzed the results based on the results predicted by Governor Sam Brownback’s administration: Nick Jordan, the state’s revenue secretary, said the administration ultimately imagines […]

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Keep Calm!

If you ever wonder what it might be like to find yourself in the middle of a terrorist incident, there is a good essay from an American who was right in the middle of the terrorist attack in London. But the most interesting part are his conclusions. I’ll just quote one of them: Keep calm […]

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The Erosion of Trump’s Base

The numbers guy, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has been sifting through the data and as usual has come up with a conclusion that contradicts conventional wisdom — Donald Trump’s base is actually shrinking. But, I hear you say, a somewhat stable 35% to 40% of the country approves of Donald Trump. That’s not shrinking. However, […]

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Who Would Do That?

Seth Meyers hits the nail on the head. Not just about Donald Trump’s crazy behavior, but also who would believe anything Trump says? It is so easy to catch him in a lie, even obvious lies. Who cares if Trump made recordings of his conversations with James Comey (which he almost certainly did not)? You […]

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Kissing Trump’s Ass

© Michael Andrew Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting, and of course he started it off by praising himself and castigating the Democrats and calling them names. But then he did something that chilled me to the bone. One after another, he had his cabinet members sing his praises, like he was some […]

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I Believe

[Originally posted April 5, 2017 by Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare. But just as relevant two months later.] I believe the President. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. And I believe him now when he says his travel ban has […]

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An Environment of Failure

Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord is very unpopular with Americans. According to a new poll, 59% are opposed (of those, 46% are strongly opposed), while only 28% support his decision (which, somewhat surprisingly, is smaller than the number who say they approve of the job Trump is doing). […]

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All the Pieces of the Puzzle

Every day or so, we get another piece of information that connects the Trump administration to Russia. The newest revelation is that Trump, immediately upon taking office, tried to do a huge favor for the Russians: Top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for […]

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