2017 was a year of record weather-related disasters. Gee, I wonder what could be causing so many of them.
Daniel Larison on the Trump administration's belief that we can bully other nations into doing what we want. The motto seems to be something like "Diplomacy is for pussies."
Trump claims he made good on his promise to repeal Obamacare and a lot of his supporters believe he has. But as Jordan Weissmann notes, it lives on.
Conservative writer Rod Dreher is dismayed (and for some reason, surprised) that right-wing news source Brietbart thinks it's right to slant its coverage in ways that help Donald Trump.
Kevin Drum notes that some staunch Republicans are getting real uncomfy as it becomes more and more undeniable that the current modus operandi of their party involves appealing to (and exacerbating) the worst racist tendencies in their base.
Donald Trump used to criticize Barack Obama for playing too much golf. Donald Trump promised that if elected president, he would not go out and play golf a lot. Donald Trump now plays way more golf than Obama ever did…and on courses that cost taxpayers a lot more money. And as Kevin Drum also notes, Donald Trump now plays golf and tries to stop us from finding out he's playing golf. The maddening thing about all that, of course, is that his supporters see nothing wrong with any of this. Their guy can do whatever he wants.
Speaking of "fake news" as we all must do these days, it's interesting to me how fact-checking sites like Politifact are now debunking different kinds of reports. They used to just do stories where someone got a statistic wrong or took a true story and spun it to mean something else…and there are still plenty of stories like that. But there are now a lot of stories like "Sasha Obama just crashed her expensive new car into a lake" or "Roy Moore takes the military vote, pulls ahead by 5,000 votes" where someone, probably to get clicks on a website, just made up something from the whole cloth. It's becoming very profitable in today's world to knowingly lie.
Finally: As I write this, an Alabama Judge has just rejected a court filing by Alabama Judge Roy Moore to stay the certification of the election he lost. Moore's insistence on embracing every nutcase theory that he didn't really lose shows why it's a good thing he lost his Senate bid. His judicial career before that was a shameful display of "the law is whatever I want it to be" masked in claims he was doing God's work. The head of Doug Jones' campaign that beat him thinks Moore would have lost — maybe by an even wider margin — if all that stuff about him dating and molesting teenagers had not surfaced. I'd like to think that's so.