Tag Archives: blake

Under Trump, Trade Deficits Are Up, Interest Rates Have Doubled, and Car Sales are Plummeting

by DawnBxl60247 Posted on April 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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One of the remarkable things about Donald Trump’s presidency is that every time he does something, you can find a tweet from a few years ago saying how terrible that thing is. Not just for a few things, either. It happens over and over and over. Aaron Blake finally brings this observation to the mainstream press:

Over the last two weeks, President Trump has attacked Syria without congressional approval, ratcheted up the use of force in Afghanistan with a huge bomb, and moved to reverse the Obama administration’s policy of releasing White House visitor logs.

Each of these actions runs completely counter to the views and values once espoused by Trump on Twitter. And they join an amazingly long — and growing — list of old Trump tweets that have become eerily applicable to Trump’s own presidency in ways that scream “hypocrisy.”

Blake follows this with a list of Trump’s tweets, which reads like a time travel story about a younger version of Trump sending desperate tweets to his older self to try to warn him away from acts of folly. Sort of like that Sandra Bullock movie except with Twitter.

If anyone ever gets the chance to ask our suddenly press-shy president about this, I don’t know what he’ll say. What he believes, I suspect, is that we’re all losers and morons. He said all that old stuff because he was attacking Obama. Duh. It’s ridiculous to think it represents what Trump actually believes. When you’re in a fight, you say what it takes to win. Truth is irrelevant. It’s all performance art.

This is sort of like uber-conspiracy theorist lunatic Alex Jones, who is currently fighting a child custody battle by claiming that his radio show is just performance art, and no one could possibly take it seriously. This probably explains why Trump is such a big fan.

As for the rest of us, I guess we’d better get on the bandwagon. We need to start saying stuff about Trump without bothering to check if it’s remotely true. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

American war casualties have gone up 100 percent under Trump. (This is actually true if you pick the right dates. Not that it matters.)
The February trade deficit with Mexico under Trump doubled compared to Obama’s first February. The trade deficit with China was two-thirds higher. (True!)
Automobile sales have plummeted at an annual rate of 40 percent under Trump. (Also true!)
Interest rates have more than doubled since Trump was elected. (This is true too!)
Trump has the lowest recorded IQ of any American president ever. (That’s what people have told me, anyway.)

You get the idea. Stop worrying about whether stuff is fair or accurate or any of that stuff. It’s all performance art!

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Under Trump, Trade Deficits Are Up, Interest Rates Have Doubled, and Car Sales are Plummeting

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Americans Not Really That Angry After All

by ElliottKahle Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Aaron Blake makes an interesting point today about the notion that Donald Trump and other presidential candidates are uniquely appealing this year because voters are so angry:

They’re simply not — or at least, not abnormally angry. Despite the rise of two candidates who have embraced the idea of anger, our country simply isn’t unusually angry about how things are going in Washington.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows just 24 percent of Americans describe themselves as “angry” about the way the federal government works. I say “just,” because that’s actually on the low end of where that number has been in recent years. (An additional 47 percent describe themselves as “dissatisfied but not angry.”)

It seems as though I’ve heard about the seething anger of the electorate before nearly every election in my life. Joe Klein takes a drive through the heartland every few years and reports back about this. But all sorts of polling evidence suggests that Americans aren’t really all that unhappy in general and not really all that angry about the government. No more than usual, anyway. Now, maybe this year really is different. Maybe voters are more responsive to angry appeals even if they aren’t especially angry in general. But for all the talk, Blake is right: the polling data doesn’t really show anything unusual.

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Americans Not Really That Angry After All

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

by VetaMcgough294 Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Judge Barry G. Williams declared a mistrial in the trial of William Porter, the first of six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Gray died in April from injuries suffered after Baltimore police left him unbuckled but shackled in the back of a police van during a ride to a booking station, sparking turbulent protests throughout the city.

Jurors said on Wednesday that they were deadlocked on all counts. Porter had pleaded not guilty to second-degree assault, involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. After deliberating for about a day, jurors had told the court that they were deadlocked; the judge instructed them to continue to try to reach a unanimous verdict. It didn’t happen.

Prosecutors argued that Porter criminally neglected his duties by failing to buckle Gray into a seat, or to get him medical attention when it was clear that he needed it. But Porter’s lawyers said it was the driver’s responsibility to make sure Gray was buckled in, and that Porter fulfilled his responsibility to Gray’s safety when he told his supervisor that Gray needed to go to the hospital.

City officials were again on edge as Baltimore awaited a verdict. Last April, Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake declared a weeklong curfew and called in the National Guard after riots broke out around the city. Rawlins-Blake issued a statement following the judge’s decision on Wednesday calling on protesters to show “respect for our neighborhoods” and saying that the city was “prepared to respond” to any unrest.

The Harford and Howard county school districts canceled all field trips to Baltimore this week in anticipation of possible protests. The CEO of Baltimore schools also sent a letter to parents Monday saying he was “very concerned” about how students might respond. The letter drew criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which said it was wrong to equate students’ desire to demonstrate with potential violence.

Judge Williams is expected to set a date for Porter’s new trial on Thursday. Trials for the other five officers charged in Gray’s death are also expected to begin soon.

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Justice Is Postponed in the Death of Freddie Gray

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This Pro-Hillary Cowboy Anthem Will Make Your Ears Bleed

by BirgitNoblet Posted on December 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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The 2016 presidential election’s stupid season has begun. Sure, it’s only been a month since the midterms, but a bevy of super-PACs are already boosting Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign. Three new pro-Hillary groups have been established in the past six weeks, the Washington Post‘s Matea Gold noted Thursday.

One of those new super-PACs is Stand With Hillary, which debuted by releasing a truly horrendous pro-Hillary country anthem. In the video—which leans heavily on shots of barns, tractors, and construction workers—a bearded cowboy croons about his desire for Clinton to run for president one more time. “Now it’s 2016,” he sings, “and this time I’m a thinkin’, guys put your boots on and let’s smash this ceiling,” at which point a pane of glass with 2016 written on it is literally smashed with a sledgehammer. Oy vey.

“Don’t matter if you’re living across this great land in a red or blue state,” he sings. “Cuz our American dream is at stake and there’s some hard choices that need to be made. We’re needing a leader who is tough and ready, who’s got vision.” It’s left unsaid whether this cowboy favors Clinton for her hawkish foreign policy views, her support of fracking, or her thoughts on parental leave laws.

But purely as a piece of music, this is rubbish. If you want a better country song, try some Blake Shelton. And if you want a song to serve as the soundtrack to Clinton’s presidential rerun, it’s never a bad time to revisit the 2008 classic “Hillary4U&Me”:

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This Pro-Hillary Cowboy Anthem Will Make Your Ears Bleed

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El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

by JacquelLiddell Posted on April 11, 2014

El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

By

Shutterstock

It’s more likely than not that El Niño will rise from the Pacific Ocean this year — and some scientists are warning that it could grow into a bona fide monster.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center put out a bulletin Thursday saying there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that El Niño will develop later this year. Australian government meteorologists are even more confident — they said earlier this week that there’s a greater than 70 percent chance that El Niño will develop this summer.

Not totally clear on what this El Niño thing even is? Andrew Freedman explains at Mashable:

El Niño and La Niña events refer to fluctuations in air and ocean conditions in the tropical Pacific. El Niño events are characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, and they add heat to the atmosphere, thereby warming global average temperatures. They typically occur once every three to seven years and can also alter weather patterns around the world, causing droughts and floods from the West Coast of the U.S. to Papua New Guinea.

There was a particularly brutal El Niño from 1997 to 1998, which killed an estimated 23,000 people and caused tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. The looming El Niño could match the intensity of that outburst. More from Mashable:

Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, said conditions are changing rapidly in the Pacific, going from 50/50 odds of an El Niño, to a setup that eerily resembles the circumstances that preceded the monster El Niño of ‘97-’98.

“It’s something we haven’t really seen since the ’97 El Niño,” Blake said of the westerly wind bursts and ocean observations.

El Niño events aren’t our fault — they’re just a fact of life on planet Earth, caused by inherent instability in Pacific Ocean weather patterns. But we may be making things worse for ourselves. Scientists reported in July that El Niño is arriving more frequently now than had been the case before we started heavily polluting the skies with greenhouse gases. And in January, a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change forecast that more El Niños will be of the extreme variety as we continue to warm the globe.


Source
ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Watch, NOAA
Unusually Intense El Nino May Lie Ahead, Scientists Say, Mashable

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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El Niño could raise meteorological hell this year

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