Repubs have been working overtime trying to spin the Barr Memo into something they can call gold - and it just ain't gonna happen. Bloomberg: In terms of substance, the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was good news for Donald Trump. Not as good as Trump claimed. Not, perhaps, as good as Attorney General William Barr suggested in his summary of the case. Overall, though, the story of Mueller’s probe surely looks better for Trump now than it did 10 days ago.
But the politics? There the news is all bad for Trump. A week after Barr’s summary – and after some pretty successful spin from the Trump team that produced a lot of favorable coverage – there’s been no reaction at all from the electorate.
On March 22, the day Mueller’s report was delivered, FiveThirtyEight estimated that Trump’s approval rating was at 41.9 percent and his disapproval at 52.9 percent. By March 31, he had inched up to 42.1 percent approval and stayed flat at 52.9 percent disapproval. It’s possible that the mix of polls or random fluctuations are masking a small improvement. It’s also possible that the news has been slow to reach those who pay less attention to politics. But those theories are increasingly difficult to buy as the days go on and the story fades. Nor are polls about the investigationshowing any radical shift toward Trump. So it seems likely that Mueller’s report isn’t changing many minds.
Here’s why that’s bad news for Trump. His approval rating is the second-worst of any president on record after 801 days in office, which is where Trump was on Sunday. Only Ronald Reagan, at 41.1 percent, was worse. Trump is dead last in disapproval rating. No other president was over 50 percent. He’s also last in net approval (that is, approval minus disapproval) at -10.7.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it - and a moral code that glorifies it.
This may well be exactly what the tweeter says it is. ie: "White people + cocaine". They look like they're just happy and having fun - butto be safe, maybe we should back it up with a Clinical Consult, to see if we need to adjust this guy's meds to prevent the kind of seizure thingie he seems to be having.
And possibly a parenting tip: Maybe gamers get so totally absorbed in their games because the rules are consistent, they make sense, and can be learned - unlike - you know - in real life.
For some "conservatives", this could mean they start to turn back to a more mainstream version of their former selves. Kinda where I used to be - before Willie Horton, and that horrifying clusterfuck at the '92 Republican convention in Houston. (Yeah, OK - prob'ly not. A guy can dream) Vox:
Notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims a “form of psychosis” caused him to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.
For years Jones, the founder of InfoWars.com, peddled a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman brutally killed 20 children and six adults in 2012. Jones has repeatedly claimed the massacre was a “giant hoax” carried out by “crisis actors” in a broad scheme to trample on Second Amendment rights.
In a video released Friday, Jones acknowledged in a sworn deposition stemming from a lawsuit filed by the families of Sandy Hook victims that the school shooting was in fact real. Jones blamed the “trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much” for triggering his extreme distrust in news and information. In any field - any market at any time in history - there's always been a struggle to be seen and heard. They started calling it "clutter" as Mass Media was coming into its own, and if you want to get your message out, and make it stick so as to make yourself memorable to the consumer, you have to figure out ways of cutting through all that clutter. In a media universe that exists in cyberspace, the clutter has grown to a level that drowns out all but the loudest voices - or the weirdest - or the most adamant - or the ones that are just plain adamant about their weirdness to the exclusion of everything but the part that might be useful for cutting through the clutter. Anyway, one by one, the darlings of Wing-Nutopia are showing themselves to be even worse phonies than the "librul media elites" they say they love to hate. And it's kind of encouraging that the courts are proving again to be the means of making some of these dicks behave less dickishly. Of course, that means we're right to be worried about what Mitch McConnell is trying to pull - stacking the Judiciary with Daddy Staters who're more than a little sympathetic to shutting us off from our 1st amendment right to petition for redress. And so it never ends. There's no such thing as Once-n-For-All, and we have to stay in this fight no matter what.
