For Barack Obama, this summer’s been one long slog.
Between Congress, woes and scandals, he should’ve moved to Prague.
But there’s nothing like a terrier
To make the White House merrier,
And there’s nothing Americans love more than a presidential dog.
Left: Sutter coaches Gov. Brown, 74, doing push-ups; right, Reagan used as a prop intended to humanize Gov. Scott
You can tell a lot about a person’s character by the way they treat animals. For millions of dog lovers, for example, learning that Mitt Romney had once decided to force his Irish setter Seamus to ride in a kennel strapped to the roof of his car on a 12-hour family vacation, even after Seamus got sick in the kennel, exposed a man whose life of privilege had left him with a deficit of compassion and common decency.
The revelations this week that Gov. Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, got rid of a dog that appears to have been acquired in 2010 as a prop for his campaign for governor is similarly a window into Scott’s character. And it stands in stark contrast with the the story of another big-state governor elected in 2010, Jerry Brown, and his dog, Sutter, who has become an unofficial mascot in California since the governor took office.
The Trump administration rarely bothers with a strategy or plan,
Preferring to sow chaos and disruption whenever they can.
Every day they must come up with some,
New Epstein-file coverup diversion,
And that, Dear Reader, is why the United States is making war on Iran.
“When I look at Donald Trump as a person, I see a failed real estate guy from Queens with a lot of natural showman talent, whose obviously poor physical condition is covered by terrible, ill-fitting suits and a lot of makeup. When I listen to him I hear incoherent bluster and self-absorbed whining. None of this makes me experience him as strong. … The strongman is strong because of the law of transitivity. If you accept at a certain point that he is stronger than you, then you are accepting that you are weaker than him. You are joining in the collective creation of the strongman.“
“If you combine an economy that people don’t like with a prolonged war that you know nobody in his base believes they voted for, that’s a toxic problem.”
“We’ve spent $8 trillion in the Middle East. And we’re not fixing our roads in this country. How stupid is it? We’re not fixing our highways, our tunnels, our bridges, our hospitals, even.”
Nate Silver: “According to the AAA, average retail gas prices in the U.S. are now $3.45 per gallon, up about 50 cents from a week ago. However, the problems are likely to worsen significantly as supply chains are disrupted. Traders at Polymarket anticipate that the most likely range for gas prices to land by the end of March is between $4.50 and $5.00. And although there’s a wide range of uncertainty, there’s a 41 percent chance they exceed $5.00 by the end of the month.”
“U.S. oil futures have followed their biggest weekly rise ever by surging as much as 20% in Sunday evening trading, vaulting above $100 a barrel for the first time since war in Europe rattled energy markets in 2022,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
G. Elliot Morris: “According to a simple average of new high-quality surveys, 38% of Americans approve and 49% disapprove of U.S. military action in Iran. … When ignoring ‘don’t know’ respondents, 56% disapprove.”
“The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the job market continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The unemployment ticked slightly higher to 4.4%.”