Events

Welp, the Senate has acquitted President Trump almost entirely along party lines, as everyone knew it would. Only Mitt Romney (R-UT) crossed the aisle to vote for conviction. Here's a roundup of the news in the last few hours: Josh Marshall says "Romney's vote is more than symbolic" because it puts the lie to the Republican Party's assertion that Trump did nothing wrong. George Conway gets caustic in "I believe the president, and in the president." The Atlantic says Congress has lost its power over...

You'll just have to imagine the context for all of these comments I posted on my Facebook feed last night. At least I put them in chronological order: Watching the State of the Union with the sound off, and PBS closed captions. And a big martini.—at Agami Contemporary Sushi. I don't know if I can do this. I thought without the sound my skin wouldn't crawl as much. But the words could have come from the Politburo. And Mike Pence is so creepy. OK, I need a non-trivial truthful statement. Just one. Please....

Did someone get trapped in a closed time loop on Sunday? Did I? Because this week just brought all kinds of insanity: Video emerged of the President acting like a teenager on too much Dr Pepper during the national anthem on Super Bowl Sunday. Margaret Sullivan's headline this morning: "Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse." Yup. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker Tweeted that Illinois should lead off the next primary election cycle because...

I don't often use profanity on this blog, but this morning I am moved to call the Iowa Democratic Party's leaders a bunch of fucking morons. Last night we saw the results of the IDP picking "fast" and "cheap" for critical infrastructure in the most important election cycle in a generation. Now the national Party will go into New Hampshire with a black eye and no end of razzing from the Tweeter in Chief. It's not just that the IDP chose "fast and cheap" instead of, you know, "good." It's also that...

Both O'Hare and Midway set temperature records yesterday: 11°C at O'Hare and 12°C at Midway. Which we can all agree was a much more pleasant day than 2 February 2011.

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Today is 2020-02-02, which is 02/02/2020 in the U.S. and 02.02.2020 in Europe. There's a thing going around the Internet today that this is the first time in 909 years that both ways of representing dates have been palindromes on the same date. They put the previous instance as 01/01/1010. Unfortunately that's not true. This has never happened before, for a few reasons: Representing dates as a string of numbers only started, as far as I can tell, in the mid-19th century. As recently as the middle of the...

(Asking for a friend.) Because today she flayed Alan Dershowitz's laughable argument about presidential power by laughing at it: The will of the voters found its highest and best expression in the election of President Trump, and anything that seems likely to remove him from power or even just inconvenience him a little goes against their will. If the Founders had wanted it to be possible to legitimately remove from office a president the people had selected, they would have made three equal branches of...

At midnight Central European Time about five hours from now (23:00 UTC), the United Kingdom will no longer be a European Union member state. It will take years to learn whether the bare-majority of voters in the UK who wanted this were right or wrong. My guess: a bit of both, but more wrong than right. It will also take years to fully understand why the developed world collectively decided to throw out the institutions that brought us the longest period of peace and economic growth in the history of the...

We conclude January 2020 in Chicago having 16 out of 31 days (including today) with no visible sun, tying the all-time record of 9 consecutive days without sun set on 9 January 1992. We've had only 24% of possible sunlight this month, making this the third-gloomiest January on record after 1998 (20%) and 2011 (23%). But this is really just a consequence of our unusually mild winter. Since December 1st, we've had 46 out of 60 days above freezing, and only 6 days below -10°C. And mercifully, the forecast...