Site-Wide Activity | Progress Pond

BooMan wrote a new post, Trump Won’t Quit Until He Is Blocked, on the site Progress Pond 16 hours, 7 minutes ago

The following is not new. It’s from an essay written by Rebecca Solnit and published back on May 30th: The Loneliness of Donald Trump: On the Corrosive Privilege of the Most Mocked Man in the World. It’s an […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Trump Wants to Lead a Race War, on the site Progress Pond 18 hours, 11 minutes ago

The president committed to pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio last night during his campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. It wasn’t the only news he made, but it was the thing that stuck out most for me. There’s a […]

BooMan wrote a new post, The Only Thing Less Credible Than Trump is Everything Else, on the site Progress Pond 1 day, 16 hours ago

I think Steve Kornacki is on the right track. He’s looking at the polling numbers for Trump and acknowledging that they look bad, but he’s noting that they’ll also looked bad before him as election day drew near […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Will Trump’s Purge Work Out Better Than FDR’s?, on the site Progress Pond 1 day, 19 hours ago

Considering how far left the political pendulum had swung during the elections of 1932, 1934 and 1936, the midterm elections of 1938 were probably never going to bring good news for the Democratic Party. Some […]

BooMan wrote a new post, September Will Be a Meat-Grinder, on the site Progress Pond 2 days, 15 hours ago

Lindsey McPherson at Roll Call does a nice job of laying things out for you so you can begin to get a sense of the challenges Donald Trump and congressional Republicans will be facing when they return from […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Charlottesville Did Not Impact Tax Reform’s Prospects, on the site Progress Pond 2 days, 18 hours ago

On the surface, Stan Collender of Forbes is on solid ground when he argues that the Republicans will not succeed in enacting a comprehensive tax reform because the president is too weak. Collender presents some […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Will Charlottesville Matter in Six Months?, on the site Progress Pond 3 days, 19 hours ago

I’ve mentioned many times that I really respect Dan Balz as a bigfoot political print reporter. I think he does his job about as well as anyone can within the strictures of the genre. I believe he has respect from […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Back to the Fear and Loathing, on the site Progress Pond 4 days, 17 hours ago

I’m back home at my log cabin in the woods. Having been locked up for ten days, it smells like some combination of a gym locker room, a swamp, and a pine forest. Hopefully, we can get it aired out before long. My […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Trump Will Rally His Supporters. So What?, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 2 days ago

Greg Sargent poses a hypothetical that isn’t really hypothetical at all:

Because Trump is undermining our democratic norms and processes in so many ways, it is often easy to focus on each of them in […]

BooMan wrote a new post, The Dems Need to Take a Hard Line on the Debt Ceiling, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 2 days ago

As early as last December, I was raising the alarm bells about the debt ceiling. In a piece called Will Trump’s OMB Director Blow Up the World?, I noted that Mick Mulvaney is a debt-ceiling truther who […]

BooMan wrote a new post, The Silver Spoons White House, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 3 days ago

All I really hope to get out of John Kelly is a little insurance against the president inadvertently causing an international incident, or worse, a nuclear exchange on the Korean Peninsula. I don’t have any faith […]

BooMan wrote a new post, The Big Picture, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 4 days ago

Today is a good day to go back and look at the piece I wrote on December 9th, 2015 called: Trump and the Missing White Voters. Compare it to the Monkey Cage piece currently running in the Washington Post: […]

BooMan wrote a new post, If Only We Could Sue the GOP for Fraud, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 5 days ago

So, this 70 year-old guy named Bob Heghmann filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court yesterday against “the Republican National Committe and Virginia’s two national GOP committee members, Morton Blackwell and […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Parsing the Statement of Manafort’s Lawyer, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 5 days ago

It’s a slow August news day, so let’s do a little parsing. Yesterday, CNN published a piece on the state of play in the Trump/Russia investigation that included the following passage:
In the summer of […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Bob Mueller Has a Grand Jury Looking at Trump, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 6 days ago

I’ve lost power here at my cabin in the woods and can’t ascertain the cause or get any estimate on when it will be restored. As a result, my laptop computer will soon be useful as a paperweight, and little else. […]

BooMan wrote a new post, “The Left” Should Gaze At Their Own Navel, on the site Progress Pond 2 weeks, 6 days ago

I’m pretty scrupulous about avoiding the ongoing fights between the Clinton and Sanders wings of the party, and I’m not going to engage on those terms here. Instead, I’m just going to offer some friendly advice to […]

BooMan wrote a new post, It Looks Like Trump and Putin Colluded on Adoption Story, on the site Progress Pond 3 weeks ago

When the New York Times initially reported the story of Donald Trump having a second unplanned meeting on July 7th with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit, they also reported that the next day, on the return trip on […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Mitch McConnell Defies White House on Tax Reform, on the site Progress Pond 3 weeks ago

A day later, I’m still confused about the Republicans’ plans for enacting tax reform. One thing that is clearer than yesterday is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell intends follow the original […]

BooMan wrote a new post, Will Paul Ryan Go Down Like John Boehner?, on the site Progress Pond 3 weeks, 1 day ago

It’s painful to read the two posts I wrote last October explaining why I believed that Paul Ryan’s career as Speaker of the House was coming to an end. The analysis was solid, but it was premised on Hillary […]

BooMan wrote a new post, What is the White House Strategy on Tax Reform?, on the site Progress Pond 3 weeks, 1 day ago

There’s probably a chapter by Sun Tzu that addresses the dangers of dealing with an adversary that is so transparently stupid that their actions are impossible to predict. I may need to go hunt that down, because […]