Monthly Archives: September 2019

It appears the scientific segment of NOAA is firing back against the leadership for its being a lapdog of President Trump:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting chief scientist said in an email to colleagues Sunday that he is investigating whether the agency’s response to President Trump’s Hurricane Dorian tweets constituted a violation of NOAA policies and ethics. Also on Monday, the director of the National Weather Service broke with NOAA leadership over its handling of Trump’s Dorian tweets and statements.

In an email to NOAA staff that was obtained by The Washington Post, NOAA’s Craig McLean, called the agency’s response “political” and a “danger to public health and safety.” …

In his email to employees Sunday, McLean criticized his agency’s public statement, saying it prioritized politics over NOAA’s mission.

“The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should,” McLean wrote. “There followed, last Friday, an unsigned news release from ‘NOAA’ that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political.” [WaPo]

A statement greatly congruent with my own view, and kudos to McLean for pursuing the matter. For Jacobs, Roberts, and those who conspired with them to pervert the mission of the NWS and NOAA, this may be the first tone on the gong which will herald their exit in disgrace.

As I explained before, this was not some political incident which, while offending the political class, was essentially harmless. No, the NWS‘s services are far too valuable in safeguarding the food supply and, in extreme weather situations, lives directly. By perverting them, the citizens for which President Trump bears a responsibility are put collectively at risk. This is not a trivial change in risk – people taken by surprise by a hurricane tend to die, even in modern houses, because the resources to rescue and rebuild aren’t ready.

If Trump was an adult, he’d admit the error, apologize, and fire Jacobs, et al. But he won’t, because he’s a narcissist.

UPDATE: Jacobs did this in response to an order from Secretary Wilbur Ross. Nonetheless, I still believe Jacobs should resign for malpractice as a leader.

[Reposted after accidentally making it a tab]

Only the Shadow knows.

Except for completists, there’s only one good reason to watch Masters Of The Universe (1987).

And there it is. Now you don’t have to waste your time on this dreadful drek.

I must admit I found this report of changes in elephant behavior by Bill Andrews on D-brief fascinating:

Elephants might be popular in zoos and older kids’ TV shows, but they’re not doing so great in the wild. Asian elephants are classified as endangered, thanks in large part to human activity. But the big beasts are brainy, and they’re trying apparently trying new things in the face of these changing conditions to survive and even thrive.

At least, that’s what a team of Indian researchers describes in a Scientific Reports paper today. They observed groups of adolescent male elephants — which typically live in mixed-sex communities while young, and wander off to lead solitary lives as adults — form and stay in groups to help face the increased risks of modern life. This new behavior was most common in the most dangerous areas, and actually helped the grouped elephants grow into stronger, fitter adults. The authors say it’s just one more way animals are adapting to a changing world – not (solely) with genetics and evolution, but simply by altering their activity.

I mean, it makes sense. While once, adolescent males could just wander off on their own and expect a relatively low-risk environment, nowadays “movement into unknown habitats in search of food, water and other elephants, may become maladaptive,” the authors write. All the more so in human-dominated areas such as farms and cropland.

I don’t really have anything to say, except that it appears that elephants are finding ways to prolong what appears to be their inevitable extinction. And it’s electrifying to see evolution in action.

It appears leaving comments only appears when reading posts one at a time. If you want to comment on something reading from the home page, click on the title of the post and scroll to the bottom.

How does this not result in the resignation of the entire NOAA “political” leadership?

Nearly a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists, a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president.

In an agencywide directive sent Sept. 1 to National Weather Service personnel, hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated,” staff was told to “only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon.”

They were also told not to “provide any opinion,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Washington Post.

A NOAA meteorologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note, understood internally to be referring to Trump, came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting Alabama would “NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.” …

Late Friday afternoon, NOAA officials further angered scientists within and beyond the agency by releasing a statement, attributed to an unnamed agency spokesperson, supporting Trump’s claims on Alabama and chastising the agency’s Birmingham meteorologists for speaking in absolutes.

That statement set off a firestorm among scientists, who attacked NOAA officials for bending to Trump’s will. [WaPo]

Perverting the mission of NOAA or the National Weather Service is not a misdemeanor, if I may draw an analogy, but a major felony. What’s the next step down this path? To misrepresent a foul weather forecast because the President made some sort of off-hand remark that Cannot Be Contradicted?

What if defending a President who is showing more definite signs of dementia and narcissism costs citizens their lives?

Acting NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs was involved in drawing up the statement as was the NOAA director of public affairs, Julie Kay Roberts, who has experience in emergency management and worked on the president’s campaign.

There’s the names you need, at least to begin with. Write your Representative and Senators. This behavior is unacceptable and must stop. The best way is to force out those who indulge in it.

I’ve decided to permit direct permit comments to posts for a while. Or at least I think I have.

The climate gas numbers continue to worry, as NewScientist succinctly summarizes:

Levels of a powerful greenhouse gas jumped again last year, continuing a surge in the past few years that researchers still cannot fully explain.

Atmospheric concentrations of methane climbed by 10.77 parts per billion in 2018, the second highest annual increase in the past two decades, according to provisional data released recently by US agency NOAA.

Methane is a shorter-lived but much more powerful greenhouse than carbon dioxide. The amount finding its way from human and natural sources, which can include everything from oil and gas wells to wetlands, has been rising since 2007. The rate has accelerated in the past four years.

Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway University of London says researchers are very worried about the latest rise. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact no one is entirely sure what is driving the trend.

“The disturbing aspect is, we do not know which processes are responsible for methane increasing as rapidly as it is,” says Ed Dlugokencky of the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA supplies these charts:

Of course, if you don’t know what’s causing the rise, it becomes more difficult to treat the problem. Sure, we might find some technology that’ll suck up the methane and dispose of it, but odds are it’d be easier to deal with at the source. It’s rather like mustard gas: do you want to fix the lungs of the victims, or do you want to just not produce and use it in the first place?

Subjugation:

1. : to bring under control and governance as a subject : CONQUER
2. : to make submissive : SUBDUE [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Before 1619, there was 1526: The mystery of the first enslaved Africans in what became the United States,” Gillian Brockell, WaPo/Retropolis:

Spanish explorers brought 100 slaves to a doomed settlement in South Carolina or Georgia. Within weeks, the subjugated revolted, then vanished.

Naked? Sure. Erotic? Uh-uh. And what the hell happened to the mongoose he sent in first? I thought it would WIN the battle with the snake! Not become a bloody corpse!

It was a strange marriage, that of a moderately well-plotted and acted movie, and its wretched special-effects. Nor did they appear to embrace each other in The Lair Of The White Worm (1988). This is the story of a divine horror from a thousand years ago, its devoted, immortal attendant, and the people of today’s Ireland who are caught in its foul legend. It also reaches for eroticism, but I fear that I, at least, found those scenes supposedly erotic were ridiculous, repulsive, or so completely incoherent that it was just a question of checking my watch to see how much more time was left in this doubtful horror, wondering where this was going, and how the actors possibly kept a straight face during some of the more ludicrous scenes.

And, sadly, the last scene is sorely predictable, which is really too bad because it embodies a contradiction as it was played out in this story. If the storytellers had been thinking, however, they could have made it far more interesting than it turned out. Yes, sure, the nurse gave you the wrong test tube and you merely injected a saline solution, rather than the anti-venom you thought you were injecting into yourself. But, think – despite being bitten, you didn’t become a lascivious zombie! The strength of placebos! No, you don’t have to go mad!

You destroyed a divinity and overcame its holy venom! What can it mean? Hahahahahahaha!

So, anyways, despite the competent acting and OK plotting, the special effects were wretched and the storytellers didn’t really go organic. Too bad. But, yeah, that really was Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi.

Deb thinks it’s a moccasin plant.

It’s almost drearily obvious to the paranoid that Boris Johnson, one of the obstinate leaders of Brexit, must be a Russian asset. Not only is the disruption of European trade and military alliances which Brexit will bring on be to Russia’s advantage, but there are two other factors. First, as has been noted numerous times, Trump, himself a suspected Russian asset, is a big booster of Johnson:

Trump has been a Johnson champion for a long time. The president undercut May at every opportunity and boosted Johnson whenever he could. Johnson has seemed his kind of politician — reckless, irreverent, disruptive, not a detail person.

Through Vice President Pence, who met with Johnson on Thursday in London, Trump sent a message of support, for Britain leaving the European Union and for the prospect of a new trading agreement between the two nations that supposedly share a special relationship. “Fantastic,” Johnson said to Pence, while noting that negotiations could be difficult, which was hardly an understatement. [Dan Balz, WaPo]

For the paranoid, dabbling in disruptive politics of our closest ally is a telling sign for Trump’s potential allegiance. The other red flag^[1]? Johnson is not the best of the best, as classmate Andrew Sullivan observed a few weeks ago:

Boris was so posh it was funny. At least that’s how I saw it. And what marked him as different from the other Etonians was his decision to embrace this, and make fun of himself in the process. Others came rather insecure about their privilege and played it down — think of fellow Etonian David Cameron who decided to call himself “Dave.” Not Boris. Alongside party-boy Darius Guppy and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, he reveled in it. As sitting president, I did my small part to help him gain his footing, despite a certain amount of class resentment I’m not really proud of. …

This reputation hurt Boris in hunting for votes to be president of the Oxford Union, and he lost the first time around to someone called Neil Sherlock who was a nerdy state school kid. Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness — with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not — and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston.

Johnson and Trump are alike in that they have always been deeply ambitious, but, to use Sullivan’s spot-on adjective, second-raters – their eyes bigger than their stomachs, as it were. Such people are meat and potatoes for master manipulators, and whether it’s Putin himself, or some back-room Russian guru, I think we’re seeing a public display of the lengths to which people such as Trump and Johnson will go to be thought of as in the first rank.

Even when they don’t deserve it, and will wreck everything around them doing it.

¹ Forgive the pun. If you’re too young to understand, in a previous national incarnation, the Russians were known as “the Reds,” due to the color of the flag of the Soviet Union.

My Arts Editor happened across this news:

The E-type appears to have a lot of body types to pick from, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’ll be the one in the ad, above, or another. Long time readers will recall our own advocacy for Chevrolet to put out 1950s Corvettes replicas with electric innards.

Wouldn’t that be delicious in the garage if Chevy could give it a 200 mile range?

My Arts Editor’s comments upon review of these night-time pictures:

There’s something a little sinister and disturbing about these. Interesting.

I’m not seeing it myself. Here’s the movie review, since I mentioned it.

It comes right here in my own backyard:

Public high school coaches aren’t public officials under the law, according to the court, because their decisions about playing time and benching tardy players aren’t core government functions. …

“Simply, basketball is not fundamental to democracy,” the ruling said. [StarTribune]

What it means is that if you’re attending a high school sporting event and start screaming filthy falsehoods about the coach, she doesn’t have to take it. She can dump your ass in court and sue for damages.

Back when I was refereeing regularly at high school fencing tournaments, I didn’t hear more than a couple of groans, which is completely acceptable. I haven’t heard of it getting worse since I more or less stopped refereeing, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Steve Benen puzzles over the Trump Administration’s move to erase light bulb regulations that were designed to lessen overall power consumption:

There was no good reason for the Trump administration to roll back lightbulb energy-efficiency standards, but that’s exactly what happened this week.

Under one action, the Energy Department will repeal a regulation enacted under President Barack Obama, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, requiring an expanded number of lightbulbs in the U.S. to be in compliance with stricter energy efficiency standards. That regulation change was spun off of a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush that aimed to gradually phase out energy inefficient bulbs like incandescent and halogen bulbs.

The regulation that’s being eliminated would have redefined four categories of incandescent and halogen bulbs so that they would be subject to existing energy efficiency rules from which they were previously exempt. It would have applied to about half of the 6 billion lightbulbs used in the U.S., experts have said. […]

Trump’s Energy Department also nixed new energy efficiency standards for all pear-shaped lightbulbs that were also scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020.

I can appreciate why no one uses the phrase “lightbulb energy-efficiency standards” as click-bait, but this isn’t trivial. As The Hill’s report added, the Trump administration’s new rule “will increase U.S. electricity use by 80 billion kilowatt hours over the course of a year, roughly the amount of electricity needed to power all households in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to an analysis by the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.”

Benen forgets that the only metric of success for Trump is profits, in this case the corporate profits of the energy companies. The more they sell, the higher their profits. And since climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” the consequences of higher energy consumption are immaterial.

Trump does not share in the general public project to reduce energy consumption. It’s not even on his radar unless someone yells a question at him in the roar of Marine One.

So this measure, initiated by the Republicans themselves, should come as no surprise. Gotta prop the economy at the expense of the biosphere. And the hell with all the babies it kills. Measuring that is difficult and Trump and his successors can merely scoff at any such measurement.

Hopefully, these useful bipartisan measures can be reversed when Trump is out of office, and his movement discredited.

Even weeds can be a lovely backdrop.

North Carolina may have caught a break in getting out of the basement of state ratings courtesy of the North Carolina appellate court system, which decided Common Cause v. Lewis in favor of plaintiffs Common Cause. The complaint? That gerrymandering of districts by the GOP resulted in the denial of the rights of North Carolina citizens.

Or, as state Senator Jeff Jackson (D) put it on Facebook:

Which will no doubt lead to hellacious battles for seats, since district redrawing will happen again in a year or two, as I understand it.

Most remarkably, the GOP has announced it will not appeal. Rick Hasen on Election Law Blog speculates as to their strategy:

1. They know they will lose in the Democratic-dominated state supreme court, and there is no viable path to federal court review.
2. They would rather NOT get a holding from the state Supreme Court (this was a three-judge trial court ruling), which would have greater precedential value.
3. They hope they would have a better chance to have their “nonpartisan” map accepted by the Supreme Court if they throw in the towel (that is, they are trying to avoid a worse court-drawn map).
4. They will use this ruling to run against the Supreme Court and try for a state constitutional amendment to give them the right to engage in partisan gerrymandering after the 2020 census.

I’ll select reasons 2 and 3, with a reserve reason that they’ll try to use this decision as a spoon to stir up their base concerning the biased, liberal court system that’s against them. Given how it can be difficult to detect gerrymandering without a lot of data and advanced tools with which to analyze it, this will be an effective tactic unless the Democrats can penetrate the base with data and truth.

Another, more prosaic reason, might be financial resources. I am not privy to North Carolina GOP financial resources, but I do know that the Minnesota GOP was in some serious difficulties a few years ago. It’s quite possible that facing a Court possibly hostile to them, and having a strike or two against them already, they decided to make an economic decision and try to fight again another day. This is particularly true in the face of a competitive special election just days away in the 9th district, although outside money will lessen the drain. There is also a special election in the 3rd district, but I suspect it’s not considered competitive; the late incumbent, Rep Walter Jones (R-NC), didn’t face a Democrat in the 2018 mid-terms, and Trump won the district with a +23.6 margin.

There’s one amazing thing about The Night Of The Wererooster (2015):

It didn’t suck.

Now, I’m not getting carried away here. Some of the acting is a little iffy, and we never do get to see the monster in question in the print we saw, much to my Arts Editor’s disappointment^[1], but, quite honestly, we went into it expecting a disaster we couldn’t stand, and came out the other side just a little weirded out. In that good, creepy way that means the story managed to get into our individual subconscious.

The plot has some lovely twists to it. A collection of people show up at a lake surrounded by forest, and it turns out that all of them, except the local lady, has lost a loved one in the area. Told that another entire family was recently killed on a camping trip at another lake, they set off to investigate for clues.

And then things start getting weird. Not all these people are what we think they are. They don’t die in the order we’d prefer. And, well, when the Werehens began dancing, that was really a little freaky.

Not that there aren’t some laughs, either, but they’re a bit heavy-handed. Still, this is not a bad effort by a collection of unknowns, and the twists were logical, once the situation was understood.

Thematics is a more difficult question. Perhaps it was quite subtle, such as every experience that doesn’t kill you may still change you so much you won’t recognize yourself afterwards.

Or you can just sit back and enjoy.

¹ She enjoys chickens in all their variety, from furry to sauteed.

Back in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal conceived of and inflicted a hoax on, well, the soft sciences:

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether “a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.

The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor. [Wikipedia]

While Sokal became embroiled in some academic disputes over the matter, that seemed to be the extent of the personal damage he sustained. But that doesn’t appear to be true for one of his recent successors in the hobby of testing editors of academic journals on their expertise in their field. He is Assistant Professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. Inside Higher Ed has the story:

A hoax revealing that academic journals had accepted fake papers on topics from canine “rape culture” in dog parks to “fat bodybuilding” to an adaption of Mein Kampf met with applause and scorn in the fall. Fans of the project tended to agree with the hoaxers that critical studies scholars will validate anything aligned with their politics. Critics said that the researchers acted in bad faith, wasting editors’ and reviewers’ time and very publicly besmirching academe in the process: the story was covered by nearly every major news outlet.

Now the controversy has flared up again, with news that one of the project’s authors faces disciplinary action at his home institution. Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers. Some seven of 20 were published in gender studies and other journals. Seven were rejected. Others were pending before the spoof was uncovered.

It’s a clever semantic trap, I suppose. By defining the malpracticing journal editors as human test subjects who must, by most IRBs’ rules, be informed that a test is occurring, and be protected against dangerous or unethical activities, the journal editors transform into victims. I suspect Boghossian has stumbled further into the trap with this:

Later in Boghossian’s recent video, he’s featured discussing the matter with his collaborators, who agree that there was “no way” to get the informed consent typically required by review boards from the journal editors involved in the “audit.”

It’s always dangerous to imply your work is more important than the guidelines and rules which govern it. There’s always the option to request an exemption. But this may just be a quibble.

But it’s not clear to me that Boghossian was conducting a real study, at least in his mind. Perhaps this is because I am not intimate with the situation, but the remark from the University makes me suspicious that the IRB had to overreach in order to take the moral high ground:

The IRB determined that the project, as discussed in Aero, was research since it was “a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” The determination letter continued, “The publicly available information about the project clearly indicates an iterative and systematic approach to performing the work, with an intention of generalizing the results.”

Again, perhaps I don’t know enough about this particular situation, but generally research is about the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of hypotheses. But Boghossian, and, earlier, Sokal, did not appear to have the acquisition of knowledge as their primary goal, but rather the testing of the competency of the journal editors, and even the validity of the fields themselves.

In essence, it’s difficult to see how the IRB can possibly insert itself in a plausible manner into this situation.

And then there’s this curious comment:

“The ‘hoaxes’ are simply lies peddled to journals, masquerading as articles,” wrote the group of about a dozen professors. “They are designed not to critique, educate or inspire change in flawed systems, but rather to humiliate entire fields while the authors gin up publicity for themselves without having made any scholarly contributions whatsoever. Chronic and pathological, unscholarly behavior inside an institution of higher education brings negative publicity to the institution as well as the honest scholars who work there. Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued.”

Before we go off on Boghossian and his cohorts, let’s ask a simple question: Whose behavior resulted in the besmirchment of the academe? Was it Boghossian’s hoax articles?

Or was it the failure of the editors and reviewers of the journals to detect the hoaxes?

If the editors had rightly detected and rejected the hoaxes, there’d be nothing more than some ruffled feelings, easily smoothed over through diplomacy on Boghossian’s part. That’s easy enough to do: a few congratulations, some inquiries about their work, and soon enough they’re pleased with themselves.

But several failed the simplest of tests. We’re not talking about faked data, but, according to what I read, sheer gibberish, such as “… an adaption of Mein Kampf …” That these editors didn’t catch it is telling.

This collection of professors have lost sight of the point of science, which is to study reality and discover truth. Judging from their singular statement, they want a safe area where their work is not questioned and they need not answer to questions concerning their work – because their journals are little more than cosseting nurses. If they’re confident that their fields are legitimate, then they should be nodding with Boghossian and calling for the failed editors to be tossed out on their heads – not frantically defending failures. They worry about besmirchment? Here it is, and they’re the ones catching the blame.

But now those editors and professors have boxed themselves in. They may flush Boghossian out of Portland State University, but they’ve revealed themselves as possible frauds and hucksters. There’s no real way out of the trap, and that’s too bad. No doubt many of them are sincere, but that’s not going to help. Instead of defending truth, they chose to defend their turf, and that’s gonna hurt them.

A true measure of metaphysical toxicity. (Now if I only knew what ‘metaphysical’ really meant.)

Some stories, regardless of rendering, simply cannot be categorized nor described. Into that category I’ll flop Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes (1978). As if sharks could arise from the surf in which they lurk to hunt, kill, and eat humans, so are tomatoes doing. Between a special government investigative force, a reporter for the Social section of the local newspaper, a passel of scientists, and the Army, they may eventually figure out how the tomatoes accomplished sentience, but even then: what does one due do to destroy huge, maliciously intelligent tomatoes?

The solution will make you want to scream in falsetto. I’m so sorry for so many things, chief of which was watching this bad boy. I blame in on my Arts Editor.

Don’t even think it.

If you like kitschy camp, UHF (1989) is the embodiment of the genre, as well as an excrescense from lead “Weird Al” Yankovic’s mind. It’s neither good nor bad, for it’s moved beyond such mundane categories. It just is, and you love it or hate it according to your personality.

I thought it was mildly amusing. My Arts Editor seemed less certain.

President Trump’s summer evaluation is coming up, and of course the various factions are going to push their stories. The President’s personal team, sad for him, are handicapped, and I don’t mean the President’s performance. I mean they’re hobbled because they have to project the President’s own approach on matters like these, and it’s a killer. It’s embodied in this over-the-top remark from White House spokesman Judd Deere to WaPo:

Kids, today we’re going to measure ‘accomplishment’ using this stick.^[Wikipedia]

“I don’t know how anyone could see this summer as anything but successful with the president continuing to deliver on his promises to the American people despite the negative news coverage of this administration,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. “President Trump has accomplished more at this point in his first term than any president in history and his policies are building a safer, stronger and more secure America.”

Read it again: … accomplished more at this point in his first term than any president in history …

It’s the attitude of a Manhattanite striving to be larger than life with what appears to be empty boasting: everything’s the biggest, most important, the best ever.

This may work in Manhattan and greater New York City, but the rest of the country has a far different view of boasting. As a Midwesterner, it’s a big, red flag. The moment I see a statement like that, I want to ask, in that biting way I never use, How were you raised, son? Followed by Show me the numbers!

Given his history and his performance so far, his ineptitude in both domestic governance and foreign diplomacy, I have little reason to take Mr. Deere seriously; indeed, my first thought about him, former Press Secretaries Sanders and Spicer, and all the other spokesmen, is simply, How pathetic, followed by Have you no self-respect?

And perhaps that’s unfair of me. But there it is – for myself and the millions of other Independents who hold the future of the 2020 elections in their hands. Are they persuading anyone with this silly-ass rhetoric? Or are they just discrediting themselves?

Open wide and let it lick!