A Sociological Eye

      This is the view from Wisconsin. Those are the presidential approval ratings that came out of the latest Marquette poll of Wisconsin voters. It's the most polarized result ever seen. As one of the 98% of Wisconsinites on the left who disapprove of what has happened since the second inauguration of Trump, all I see resulting is evil. A constant stream of lies and misinformation; the appointment of a loud swarm of self-promoting, hate-stirring incompetents; the spitting on our allies; the useless, destructive tariffs; the firing of thousands of American heroes, leaving agencies we all rely on for our safety scarred and staggering; the attacks on teachers and researchers and clinics and parks that are vital to a functioning society; the censorship of terms and destruction of data; the fostering of bigotry and promotion of discrimination. And all of this destruction done in order to enrich billionaires and feed shocking narcissism. How could anyone approve of that? yo...

  There’s a fantasy out there. And it’s being used to justify a flood of actions that are stupid, counterproductive, meanspirited—oh, and often illegal. Actions like firing FBI agents, prosecutors, and inspectors general who protect Americans. “Throwing into the woodchipper” entire federal agencies doing vital work—like USAID (which saves the lives of starving children and those suffering from dangerous diseases in other countries), or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which saves Americans from being ripped off by credit card companies and banks). Shutting down a wide range of grants to charities that help people in need or assess the impacts of discrimination. Slashing the funding of research—and through that action, yanking back hundreds of millions of dollars from universities and hospitals that rely on that funding. Firing people from across all federal agencies randomly, based on their not having served the full two years or one year of probationary status, with n...

This is an example of the troubling pro-Trump spin now being seen across the mainstream media, as their owners rush to curry favor with the vindictive president. This morning I decided to open the Apple News app and see what it would suggest I read. First it offered me an article following up on plane crash victims. And then: "Donald Trump Has Never Been This Popular: Polls." That Trump headline was eye-popping to me, given that the favorability polling I saw last week indicated that under half of Americans approved of Trump's performance. I felt a drop in my stomach. Had there been a sudden swelling of approval in response to a week of chaos? No, friends, there had not. Trump's approval rating in the first weeks of his second presidency remains the lowest of any president since such polls began in 1953. It's still under 50% during these first weeks of his term--the "honeymoon period" when recently-elected presidents usually see the highest approval rate...

So: yesterday by means of a memo, the Trump administration stopped huge swaths of the government from spending money. Not Social Security or Medicare--those checks would still go out. But small businesses will not get their loans. No money will be sent to charity organizations that had won federal grants to provide services from suicide hotlines to disability accommodations to arts education. Laboratories studying cancer cures can't conduct their studies. All foreign aid is shut down, much of it lifesaving. Can the Trump administration do that? Well, in a word, no. Not legally, anyway, and not Constitutionally. The president is not a dictator. A president can't decide they don't like the laws Congress passed or the money Congress decided to allocate and just refuse to let the government spend the money. That's called "impounding" the funds. Our system of government is defined in the Constitution by a balance of powers between Congress, the president, and the c...

  Credit for this familiar image goes to KC Green. The Orange Man has yet to take office, but already it feels like everything is on fire. So I am here to remind you what to do! Remember: this chaotic spew of announcements and speculations is intentional. It is called "flooding the zone with sh*t." The theory goes that setting multiple things on fire, day after day, will have the following effects:  1. It will paralyze a sector of the populace, who won't know which fire to put out first, and will just freeze, going, "I can't believe this is happening!" 2. It will divide and conquer those being attacked, because they will each want the fire at their house to be put out first, and will have screaming fights over priorities while everything burns. 3. It will make a whole swath of people act like mythic ostriches and shove their heads in the sand, singing "La la la, everything's fine! If I don't see the news, it can't hurt me!" 4. It will s...

 What You’ve Heard Before This has been a very difficult week for those who voted for Kamala Harris. Harris lost the Electoral College by a lot (226-301), and over on the right, they’re calling it a landslide. It’s probably true that she lost the popular vote as well—but by a much, much smaller margin than the electoral vote gap, and one that continues to shrink as votes continue to be counted. (Thirteen states are still counting their votes as I write, the weekend after the election, and that includes the massive state of California.) The reaction of those who voted Republican has been predictable. If you looked at the rightwing news or social media, you saw a lot of exulting about the joy of “drinking delicious liberal tears.” Scenes of Democrats looking shocked or depressed and hugging one another were looped with gloating and laughs. That’s how things go today: when MAGA voters win, they taunt their opponents, and when they lose, they rant that the process was rigged and th...

    Yesterday, I posted on social media the graph you see here. It shows current levels of support for the presidential candidates according to gender for Generation Z, Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. I asked folks reading the post for their theories about what is going on with Gen X, and got a lot of responses. So here is my report on what people had to say! First, to summarize what this chart shows you: Millennials and Baby Boomers are nearly identical in their views, despite having a generation between them with different political preferences. About 70% of both Millennial and Boomer women support Harris, while only about 38% of men in those generations say they support her. That’s a striking binary gender gap of over 30 points. (The survey does not consider the preferences of nonbinary people.) Generations Z and X show different patterns. Gen Z voters are in the youngest voting age bracket, and for decades voters in that bracket have held more progressiv...