Friday, December 07, 2018

Facts vs. "Trump Truth:" Polling Data

Classy Trump decided the funeral of President Bush (I) was the perfect day to tout his new approval rating: 

























Beyond the poor taste, of course, is the reality that his approval ratings are not even close to 50%. “The president is citing a poll from @Rasmussen_Poll, which said that Republicans would win the popular vote for the U.S. House,” said FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who once described Rasmussen as “biased.” “Instead, Democrats won it by 9 points.” (WP)

According to FiveThirtyEight, which has been updating its calculation of the president’s approval rating from all major polls, Trump’s aggregate approval rating is around 42 percent, as of Wednesday. The aggregate average is almost the same on RealClearPolitics, where Trump is at about 43 percent, according to polling conducted between Nov. 14 and Tuesday.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Fact vs. "Trump Truth": Immigration Edition

As is the new normal on an almost daily basis over the past two years, there is the truth and the then the "truth" as told through the heavily refracted lens of Trump and his supporters' magic alternative reality universe (the Washington Post has kept a helpful running tally for the less truth adverse amongst us: Counter). As a new feature to the blog, I will occasionally highlight the large chasm that currently exists between the two:

The respected, non-profit Pew Research Institute has come up with a new study that shows the lowest levels of "illegal immigrants" in a decade, in 2016, with the steepest decline coming from the much-discussed border with Mexico: Pew


On the same day this report was released, we hear from Trump that he has a Plan B if Congress fails to authorize the $5 billion he is requesting to build his wall. This comes on top of the unnecessary dispatch of troops to the border to help Republicans in the just past election, fake stories about the caravan being led by conservative bete noire George Soros, absurd claims about caravan child grabbers, and the general fear mongering that appears to have little relationship to the reality that less people are coming to the U.S. these days (including foreign students and tourists, if you hadn't heard).  

Friday, April 20, 2018

Gun Violence in America

It is extraordinary sometimes to consider how easily ideology gets in the way of the collective future of our children. Whether it's global warming, educational funding, excessive corporate power, insane governmental debt or, of course, gun control, the ideological firmaments that many refuse to pass blind them to the effects their actions not only have on children in general but even their own.

Exhibit A in this myopic worldview is current debates around gun control and those inured to their position on the premise that no legislation, as benign as it might be, should pass to address the alarming increase in mass shootings over the past two decades. To wit, is the latest numbers from the Washington Post showing that over 200,000 students have been touched by gun violence since the Columbine shooting in 1999. Here is a visual representation of that reality (each dot is 10 students, click on image to enlarge).


Sunday, January 21, 2018

Democracy in Retreat

Trump and the Republican Congress continue to abrogate their responsibility to actually represent the people who elected them by passing, or trying to pass, extremely unpopular legislation. This was true of the Obamacare overhaul that fell only one vote short, the tax cut for the wealthy that passed last month and now the attempt to dismantle the Dream Act, that has caused the government shutdown we are currently mired in ...

















To be fair, the majority of Americans are not supportive of either Trump or the Republican-led Congress, but that is little salve for the majority of Americans suffering through the first year of this dysfunctional, Russian-sponsored, administration.