Things just get curiouser and curiouser…It turns out that retiring judge Anthony Kennedy is a lot closer to Trump than anyone really knew.  Justin Kennedy, Judge Kennedy’s son, led Deutschebank’s real estate division that loaned Trump $1 billion when no other bank would.  Because of that relationship, Trump and the father have apparently been VERY friendly, even exchanging pleasantries about his son at the State of the Union address this year.

So, a SUPREME COURT JUSTICE who has a close relationship with the President of the United States has been ruling in favor of that president in very controversial rulings, and may have even stepped down at this time to allow Trump to replace him before the mid-term elections threaten the control by the Republicans.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

This is the latest handy-dandy chart on political media bias put out by allgenearlizationsarefalse.com, home of mediabiaschart.com which rigorously studies media outlets for systematic bias.  Media outlets are charted on two axis, with the x-axis used as a measure of political bias with neutral in the center.  The y-axis scales from factual news at the top to inaccurate and fabricated at the bottom.  The developer of this chart is a patent attorney from Denver who also has a degree in English.  She uses both her legal skills and technical English skills to decode bias and then chart it. If you click on the pic, it will give you a bigger chart to see the detail.  Most interesting is the grouping of media outlets by characteristics of each’s reporting – the green box is News; the yellow box is Fair Interpretation of the News; the orange box is Unfair Interpretation of the News; the red box is Nonsense Damaging to Public Discourse.

Let’s look at who’s in the red box.  On the left are the obvious ones that no one I know reads or reposts since they are so biased.  But look on the lower right corner.  Look at that group.  From Fox News, to the Daily Caller, Newsmax, RedState, Breitbart, and the Blaze, these outlets make up the sources of “news” for the vast majority of conservatives.  This is how you get the arguments that “Bill Clinton passed a law in 1997 to separate kids from families” and “Barack Obama separated kids just like Trump”, or that immigrants are flooding the country when they’re not, or that Trump is the most accomplished president in history, when in fact he’s actively destroying what’s left of our democracy.  Even today, they are raging about “liberals attacking” Melania Trump for her tone-deaf fashion faux pax last week on her trip to south Texas.  Down is up, up is down, and the sun rises in the west.  This is why you can’t get anything accomplished through debating these folks.  They are so far out in right field that you’ll never get anything done trying to talk to them.

I highly recommend the posts on this blog describing the methodology of plotting the media companies in this light.  Oh, and go show it to one of your conservative friends.

Just don’t get splattered when their head explodes.

No one, except for Trump and his billionaire Commerce Secretary, believe trade wars are a good idea.  For those in business, trade wars are often catastrophic.  Cue Harley Davidson, the largest US manufacturer of motorcycles, who just announced that THEY ARE MOVING MANUFACTURING OUT OF THE US due to Trump’s import tariffs on steel and Europe’s retaliatory tariffs against American motorcycles..  The tariffs are adding an additional cost of $2,200 PER MOTORCYCLE, or about $100 million per year.  This is why trade wars are stupid.

In general, companies are rational (when it comes to math, anyway).  If an outside force adds a cost, companies will look to immediately neutralize that cost.  The problem with motorcycles, as in other manufacturing, is that net margins are relatively thin.  Adding $2,200 in cost to a motorcycle puts the price of that motorcycle outside of the ability of many customers to buy, and Harley can’t afford to absorb.  Result?  Trump is accomplishing precisely the opposite of his stated goal of increasing manufacturing jobs in the US.  His stupidity is destroying jobs by the thousands.

And the invertebrates in Congress just lie there, doing nothing.

Yesterday, there was another defection of a major conservative from the Republican Party. In a speech before the Federalist Society on Friday, George Will announced that he left the Republican Party and that he was urging other conservatives to defeat Trump and to  “grit their teeth” for the four years after 2020.  You know it’s bad when George Will jumps ship.

Boom.

Just hours after Trump caved to overwhelming pressure on his idiotic separation scheme, word started leaking out of the White House that, characteristically, after causing chaos with some cruel, pointless tactic, the Trump White House has no clue how to reunite over 2,400 kids with their over almost 5,000 parents.  Anyone with common sense can divine the reason because everything Trump does is half-assed, and intended to inflict the most damage, either by design or, more likely, by gross incompetence.  From slashing taxes, to efforts to destroy the ACA, to attempts to reverse education reforms, undo environmental policies, sell off protected lands, everything Trump touches – well I’ll quote Tony Soprano on this one – “I’m the reverse Midas; everything I touch turns to sh*t.”  That old quote is certainly apropos here.  Trump thoughtlessly ripped families apart, and to keep all those people out of sight, immediately shipped them off to seemingly random cities all over he country.  It’s easily conceivable that a family of 4 could have members in different Trump Big Box Prisons in four different states.

Trump thinks that him signing yet another executive order (which reverses his last executive order) will make all the furor go away without doing anything else.  It’s up to us to not let that happen.  There are almost 7,500 people scattered to the 4 winds with no plan to reunite them and to treat them humanely.  It’s time for us to keep the pressure on to fix this catastrophe that is completely of Trump’s own making.

There is a place for anger, and this is it.