Top: Rep. Ellmers; bottom: former Rep. LungrenDaily Caller, the gay-hating, climate-changedenying website published by Swanson Foods heir Tucker Carlson, conducted a non-scientific (naturally) survey of House members asking if whether they would be willing to forgo their salaries while the government was shut down.
Result were skewed to make Democrats look feckless (naturally!), even though no Democrats voted to shut down the government. The Daily Calling reporting also produced a couple of unintentional bloopers, however — one that made a North Carolina tea bagger look like a wanton hypocrite and another that exposed the Daily Caller’s apparently casual approach to fact checking and out-of-date knowledge of who actually serves in the 113th Congress.
Watch a young California liberal go off on GOP Rep. Dan Lungren during a town hall meeting in his district last week. Lungren, a former state attorney general, is widely unpopular in the state, and was one of the few Republican House members who had a tough reelection in 2010, only managing to pull out a win after Karl Rove came in with a big ad buy at the end.
Hey, yelling at congressmen eventually put the tea party in charge of the government, so you can’t say it doesn’t work.
Garbage dump in metro D.C. area; inset: Rep. "Styrofoam Dan" Lungren, R-Calif
It has only been about three months since Republicans took control of the House and there are already signs that voter remorse is setting in.
“This is a case of the Republicans being spiteful and stupid,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)
The reason for this is clear. Republicans won the House by promising to focus on fixing the economy and produce “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Not only have they broken those promises — they haven’t even bothered to schedule a hearing on employment — they passed $61 billion in budget cuts that conservative economic experts predict would kill about 1 million jobs and stall or reverse recovery from the Bush recession.
Otherwise, all the GOP has done is waste time on the taxpayers’ dime with a series of gimmicks. They read the Constitution out loud (and bungled even that). They voted to repeal of health-care reform even though they knew it had no chance of becoming law and have yet to utter a peep about the replacement bill they promised. And they passed a resolution to encourage placing “In God We Trust” signs on all 9,000 federal buildings.
Add to that list of gimmicks their cynical decision to reverse part of the Democrats’ program to make the Capitol Building more energy efficient:
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
“They’ve invested heavily in AI labs. They’ve invested heavily in data centers. So, the first family has a financial stake in this industry, and as a result, the president of the United States is compromised.”
— “Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Monday said President Trump will likely not heed calls from technology leaders to implement guardrails on the development of artificial intelligence because of his family’s investments in the industry,” NewsNation reports.
“Young Americans today have never witnessed Congress authorize a war, they’ve never seen a U.S. administration balance its books, they’ve never watched a well-funded and empowered state department operate, and they see only mistrust between allies. They assume the situation is normal. It is not. … The real cost of forgetting the pre-9/11 world is not a country that has changed, but one that no longer knows it could be different.”
“We’re working through some political issues in Israel. I think we agree with them on the end state. They just have a crazy election, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards.”
— Jared Kushner, quoted by CBS News, on the lack of progress in Gaza.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
“Iranian strikes have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at bases across the Middle East, and caused about $184 million worth of damage at U.S. diplomatic facilities, according to a Pentagon watchdog report,” the Washington Post reports. “The inspector general’s report to Congress on Operation Epic Fury — the Trump administration’s name for the war with Iran — also details the extent of U.S. munitions shortages, in the first comprehensive public accounting of the war, which is now in its seventh month.”
Half (50%) of U.S. adults say they are either very concerned (23%) or somewhat concerned (27%) about the possibility that AI will cause the end of humanity, a new YouGov survey finds. Another 39% of Americans say they’re not very concerned (21%) or not at all concerned (17%) about an AI apocalypse, while 11% aren’t sure.
A majority of Americans ages 55 and up and a majority of Republicans of all ages support the use of Flock technologies in their communities, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from August 28 to 31. Split by age, party, education level and gender, no other demographic group had a majority of support for the cameras. Among age groups, younger Americans were the least likely to support Flock, with only 21% of respondents aged 18 to 34 in favor of the technology.
About one-third (31%) of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of how the U.S. Supreme Court is handling its job, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Survey, while 53% disapprove. Almost all Democrats disapprove of the Supreme Court’s job handling (12% approve and 79% disapprove), while most Republicans approve (63% vs. 26%). Republicans who say they’re MAGA supporters overwhelmingly approve of the Supreme Court’s job handling (73% vs. 19%), while non-MAGA Republicans are more closely divided (49% vs. 36%).
