Near Majority Favors Impeaching Trump -- A new Public Policy Polling survey finds 49% of voters support impeaching President Trump, as compared to 41% who are opposed to doing so. Also interesting: Trump’s approval rating has declined by a net 7 points in the last month.
Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Trumpproval
Monday, October 30, 2017
Trumpproval
A new NBC/WSJ poll puts Donald Trump's approval at 38%, the worst yet for that poll. Individual polls on Trump's approval rating go up and down, but the long-term trend is almost linearly down. Real Clear Politics has a table of all 223 public polls of Trump's approval/disapproval since he took office. We plotted them with least-squares regression lines and got the following graph:
From the data, it is clear that Trump's honeymoon lasted until about March 7. That's the last date any pollster had his net rating in positive territory. But even in February, 20 polls had him under water, and by double digits in seven of them. Even worse, the trend lines are unambiguous: Approval is dropping and disapproval is increasing. This could spell trouble for the Republicans in 2018, since how well the president's party does in the midterms is strongly correlated with the president's own popularity.
Draining the Swamp
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Card Carrying
"Expressing your opinion that someone is a racist when they do things that are racist is not unlawful — it's protected by the First Amendment.” https://t.co/0YW0xzoLM3
— ACLU (@ACLU) October 28, 2017
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Trumpproval
A couple of weekly pollsters released their latest on Wednesday, and the numbers definitely won't be finding their way to Donald Trump's Twitter feed. First up is Fox News, which certainly tries to tote the President's water, but the numbers say what they say. They have him with the lowest approval rating ever for their poll, 38%. He's losing ground among key constituencies, including men without a college degree, working-class white men, and evangelicals. Politico/Morning Consult, meanwhile, has Trump with a slightly better overall approval rating, at 42%. But the rest of the numbers are pretty grim, as a majority of respondents find him untrustworthy (53%), dishonest (51%), reckless (56%), thin-skinned (52%), lacking in compassion (54%), unstable (54%), and sexist (50%)... These numbers represent a dip from last week; the obvious explanation is Trump's (mis-)handling of the La David Johnson phone call. Puerto Rico surely didn't help, either. While Trump's approval rating ebbs and flows depending on whatever the drama of the week is, it is clear that the overall trendline is downward, and pretty sharply so. Over the past nine months, he's bled about 6.5 points; from pulling numbers regularly in the mid-40s to numbers regularly in the high-30s. For a president who won office by the skin of his teeth, that's very concerning. It's also the case that no president has had such a bad first year on the approval-ratings front since the numbers were first tabulated during the Truman years. The only presidents who were even in the ballpark (see the data at the link) were Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford. Those two men saw their parties lose 54 and 49 seats in the House, and 8 and 4 seats in the Senate, respectively, in the midterm elections. So, to the extent that the numbers have predictive value, the conditions certainly appear to be building for the wave election of all wave elections.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Freedom Must Be Won In Every Generation
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Sunday Walk
Saturday, October 21, 2017
No Bread All Circus
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Monday, October 16, 2017
Sunday Walk
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Moore No More?
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Monday, October 09, 2017
Upon Waking
Sunday, October 08, 2017
Sunday Walk
Saturday, October 07, 2017
Trump Disapproval Unprecedented
Donald Trump's approval rating... has cratered again, to its lowest point since he took office. The AP, which does its measurements on a weekly basis, now has him at 32%. The 20s are uncomfortably close, and with them Richard Nixon's record-low Watergate-level approval ratings (around 25%). That is not good for any president, particularly one who is in his first term and is overseeing a generally solid economy (the September jobs report notwithstanding...)... [I]s he being punished for his ham-fisted handling of Puerto Rico? For his cabinet dysfunction? His handling of North Korea and/or Iran? Something else? Could be because Saturday Night Live is back, with Alec Baldwin's devastating impersonation. Maybe it's because of Las Vegas... Whatever the case may be, it is pretty clear that Trump's ceiling is somewhere around 40%, and that he's only going to achieve that under the best of circumstances. This means that we're presumably headed into brand new territory—since approval ratings have been compiled (the Truman years), no president has gone into the midterms (or a possible re-election campaign) with so many Americans unhappy with their performance.More signs of a Democratic wave to come, perhaps, if enough of us can make it through these months of GOP-domination to vote them out in the mid-terms, though it is hard to know if things like polling approval which have always mattered in the past still matter quite the same way in Trumpmerica with its GOP-safe gerrymandered districts and voter disenfranchisement and ubiquitous algorithmically-mediated deceptions and frauds afoot.
Friday, October 06, 2017
MundiMuster! SwingLeft Is Ready To Boot Doll-Eyed Dolt Paul Ryan From His District and His Speaker's Perch
Watch @jonfavs, @tvietor08 and @jonlovett explain why we decided to add Paul Ryan's district--#WI01--to our map. https://t.co/96Hx9eqw7q pic.twitter.com/Xxkmakhgw4
— Swing Left (@swingleft) October 6, 2017
We’re going on offense and adding Paul Ryan’s district to our map. Join Team #WI01. https://t.co/V36fYrN9xb pic.twitter.com/BkCJBZ42rl
— Swing Left (@swingleft) October 6, 2017
pleasepleasepleaseplease Make. It. So.
Thursday, October 05, 2017
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
Lighter
Teaching Days
Tuesday, October 03, 2017
Unintelligent
Calling a device "artificially intelligent" has never once made it so.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) October 2, 2017
Every time we call devices intelligent it becomes less meaningful to call people intelligent.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) October 2, 2017
Calling nonliving nonconscious nonintelligent devices AI makes it easier for living conscious intelligent owners and users of those devices…
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) October 2, 2017
…to refuse responsibility for the reckless harmful unjust uses to which we put them. This is the primary substance and end of AI discourse.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) October 2, 2017
Monday, October 02, 2017
Thoughts And Prayers Since Columbine Have Accomplished Nothing...
MundiMuster! Call the Capitol Hill switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
Uber, But For The TeeVee...
If you follow the tech business, you may have heard the formulation, “It’s Uber, but for ...” The idea is that there’s no human endeavor that can’t be transformed by a little coding, as Uber did for taxis... This philosophy now describes an entire genre of TV... It’s Uber, but for formulaic drama. The formula, roughly: Rich jerk invents technology. Rich jerk suffers personal tragedy. Rich jerk suddenly has a reason to care about the outside world. Rich jerk applies his technology to solve a problem related to aforementioned tragedy. Rich jerk gets pushback from the establishment. But rich jerk’s technology works! Thanks, rich jerk! ...--h/t Jim Fehlinger
It's Never "Too Soon" To Talk About Real Political Solutions To Gun Violence
Don’t let anyone tell you it’s too soon to talk about our gun violence crisis. For hundreds in Las Vegas, it’s too late. Text JOIN to 64433. pic.twitter.com/XiBJEykWeI
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 2, 2017