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The 2nd Trump Presidency

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Well, it happened. Trump is getting a 2nd term. There are many Americans who find this unfathomable. There are people who are deeply saddened and concerned for our country, because they care deeply about America and they find Donald Trump antithetical to the country they thought they were living in. I sympathize with this because I felt the same way the first time he won office. It shocked me to the core, but that's because I was also ignorant about America back in 2016. I thought that character mattered. I thought that we all felt a President should represent the best of our country, the highest standard, and I knew Donald Trump is none of those things. But I was wrong. I needed to reset my understanding of America, and Americans, and I've done my best to do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm still sad this 2nd time around, and I do not believe Trump will be a good president for us. I'm just not shocked at all. It was kinda predictable. So if you find yourself in a stat...
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Media Bias

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  I typically start my day with a review of Google News because it's a decent aggregator of news from a variety of sources. My favorite mobile app for news is Ground News. For $10 a year they serve up the latest headlines while also showing you which news outlets are more (or less) biased. For a little more, they'll provide even richer data and allow you to customize your news feed and topics to avoid bias. They also do a great job of highlighting "blind spots" on both ends of the spectrum - topics that news outlets leaning right or left don't cover. To summarily dismiss all media as biased is a cop out, and it's also inaccurate. In the US, it's what lazy Trumpies say to give themselves permission to not think critically, to remain willfully ignorant, and to fully embrace their own confirmation bias. Trump feeds this narrative because it works to his advantage. "I am the only source of truth, trust only that which you hear directly from me" makes...
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An interesting debate

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 I wasn't sure what to expect from the "presidential" debate. Gotta put "presidential" in quotes because Trump definitely didn't act that way. It was definitely entertaining though, and informative. Kamala got about 20% more specific on some of her policy proposals, which is needed. I think some of her critics are holding out for more details, but at the same time Trump is miles behind her in terms of offering specifics. When asked about his plan to replace Obamacare, he freely admitted that he has none, just "concepts of a plan." For a guy who ran on replacing it in 2016, that's "sad!"  Trump took a curious line of attack several times in the debate: "you've had three years, why haven't you accomplished [thing] in that time?!" There's all kinds of flawed logic and hypocrisy in that: Harris has been VP for 3 years, one of the weakest positions in any democracy. It's not the VP's responsibility to deliver ...
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Here we go

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 I'm back. I miss blogging as a creative outlet, it's an exciting election cycle, and I got enough of a nudge from a friend to dust off the blog, so here goes.  Donald Trump is a felon, a liar, a narcissist, and generally a bad person. His supporters know this and they don't care. They can justify and minimize all of those things in an attempt to rationalize supporting him. For some of his supporters, it's a single issue - guns, abortion, affirmative action, still being mad that Obama ever got elected in the first place and seeking vengeance, whatever. But I think most of Trump's supporters are actually not single issue voters. I think most of his supporters today find a 2nd Trump presidency attractive for the same reasons they found the 1st one appealing: they're mad. There are any number of things in their lives that are not going as they'd hoped, they are struggling to live the middle class life they had hoped for, they're doing all the things their ...
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Some thoughts on impeachment

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We've had a few days of the impeachment circus so far, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. For sure, impeachment is always a political process, so it's divisive and disrupts the national dialog whether we like it or not. So I'm writing this piece mostly to try and wrap my head around what I've learned from the witnesses so far. For background, I'm looking at the current proceedings in the broader historical context of impeachment. We've only done impeached 2 presidents in the last 250 years, so it's kind of a big deal. Nixon left office before Congress actually had a chance to impeach him, though they almost certainly would have. So what is the "standard" for impeachment as it has been applied in these other cases: Andrew Johnson defied Congress. The "radical Republicans," as they were called at that time, wanted to punish the southern states and the Confederacy. Johnson disagreed, as he basically thought that approa...
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Reflections on elections

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I'm by no means an expert on interpreting elections, but since any clown with a twitter account can be president, I figured I'd at least weigh in on what I think happened here in Kentucky, and what that might mean for the year ahead. Kentucky is what I'd characterize as a modern-day conservative state. By that I mean, there are plenty of counties in this state where, if they listen to any news at all, it's Fox. KY voted for Trump over Hillary by a full 30 percentage point margin. These KY conservatives support a free press in the same way that Trump does, which is to say, only when the press is serving as a propaganda/reinforcement engine for their existing viewpoints. They support freedom of religion as long as that religion involves sweet little baby Jesus, the 10 commandments on public display, and tax breaks for Noah's Ark and the Creation Museum. When the NRA ran a campaign in 2008 that "Obama is coming for your guns" and then again in 2012 that ...
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It's that time

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Here we are - end of 2019 and people are already talking as if the 2020 election is next week. That's unfortunate. I hated the last election cycle before I knew the result, and this one is shaping up to be even worse. Kentucky has gubernatorial elections in off cycle years, so 2019 is a governor's race for us as well. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell are still my Senators - spectacular clowns but for different reasons. Here's what I know. Donald Trump still lies, every day. He's made 5276 false statements as president. Out of 1000 days in office, that's greater than 5 lies per day. Seriously.  He typically does this via his preferred communications method, the tweet His supporters not only don't care that he lies, they will defend his lies, attack others for calling out his lies, and suggest that his lies are warranted, even required, because he's the first president to ever face a critical press. This is spectacular. Donald Trump has now spent over ...
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