The Daily Parker

Aside: how the hell is it already February?

Moving on. Two more articles popped up about Tuesday night's State of the Union speech. First, via Deeply Trivial, Andrea Jones-Rooy at 538 points out that very little of what presidents propose in the SOTU actually gets enacted:

From Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, according to [Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard], presidents made an average of 34 proposals in each State of the Union or initial address to a joint session of Congress. The most requests a president made during this period were Bill Clinton’s 87 in 2000. The fewest were just nine by Jimmy Carter in 1980.¹

About 25 percent of policy announcements were ultimately successful, according to Hoffman and Howard’s definition of success, which is a complete enactment of the president’s recommended policy within a year of the address.² They grade 14 percent more as partial successes — times when the president got a portion of the policy he asked for. The average policy agenda success rate increased to 32.7 percent when a president’s party controlled both houses of Congress, which Trump’s does.³

Altogether, an average of 60.6 percent of policy proposals mentioned in the State of the Union never materialized, suggesting that any one request from Trump is more likely not to be turned into legislation. The least successful — or, if you prefer, most ambitious — president since Johnson was Gerald Ford, with a 71.4 percent failure rate over his time in office. Johnson was the most successful — or, if you prefer, most realistic — with a 47.1 percent failure rate.

Given a hostile minority and a comical lack of bipartisanship, I don't expect much of the president's program to survive until the election.

Meanwhile, James Fallows—who has written parts of SOTUs in his life—annotates this one.

I'm finally reading last night's State of the Union address, and...well...oy, gevalt.

The speech doesn't really have a lot of coherence, but SOTU speeches rarely do. Still, there's something about reading it that makes me wonder who Steve Miller actually thought would deliver it.

For example, these two passages:

All Americans deserve accountability and respect—and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.

In our drive to make Washington accountable, we have eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration in history.

First, that's a single excerpt, one clip, of the speech. There are three thoughts here, and I kind of see how they hang together. But eliminating regulations doesn't to me have much to do with accountability. In fact, the specific regulations they're eliminating will, in fact, make industry less accountable to the people, and we should start seeing unintended consequences (like death and destruction) pretty soon.

But look what he's asking for: an end to civil service protections and the politicization of the Federal bureaucracy. That's pretty consistent with authoritarian rulers the world over. It must not happen here.

Later:

America has also finally turned the page on decades of unfair trade deals that sacrificed our prosperity and shipped away our companies, our jobs, and our Nation's wealth.

The era of economic surrender is over.

From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and to be reciprocal.

We will work to fix bad trade deals and negotiate new ones.

And we will protect American workers and American intellectual property, through strong enforcement of our trade rules.

So...we're scrapping multilateral trade deals in favor of making lots of bilateral deals, all while removing regulations from industry? How will that work, exactly? Won't having ten or a hundred bilateral treaties cause a hundredfold increase in regulations? I know the President doesn't know how this works, but surely someone in the administration must, right?

And then this:

So tonight, I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties—Democrats and Republicans—to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion, and creed. My duty, and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber, is to defend Americans—to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American Dream. Because Americans are dreamers too.

You know what? F you too, Donnie. "Let's work together, we all want the same thing, and you know what? You're all ugly." (This is where some Democrats booed him.)

I could go on to his bald-face lies about how visas work, to his claiming a number of President Obama's achievements as his own, to his touting a tax "reform" that swindles the middle class out of being middle class...but no, I'll let the professionals chime in for the rest:

• Peter Baker at the New York Times ("Trump can sell an improved economy, but not himself")
• James Hohman at the Washington Post ("Trump is his own worst enemy")
• Alex Shephard at New Republic ("Big, boring SOTU")
• Fact-checks by Christopher Rugaber and Calvin Woodward at the Associated Press, Sandro Pozzi at El Pais, and of course WaPo.
• The Atlantic's Live Blog and McCay Coppins ("How the swamp drained Trump")
• TPM Media's takeaways
• Foreign press: David Smith at The Guardian, Le Monde, and El Pais. (I don't know other languages well enough to gauge the content of their papers.)

I can't wait till the next one, and hope he gives it to a Democratic majority.

I can't be sure why, but I seem to have some reluctance today to get to the State of the Union address from last night.

At some point I'll read it and comment on it. But not yet.

Where to start?

• President Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims in his first year in office—an average of nearly 6 per day.
• Meanwhile, his "cult of personality" is bringing fringe conspiracy theories into the White House itself.
• San Francisco has had three mayors in the last seven weeks, and it's getting even weirder.
• British journalist Cathy Newman did not seem to hear psychologist Jordan Peterson's answers to her questions.
• Lake Michigan is getting clearer, which is catastrophic for its ecology.

And now, a stand-up meeting.

Yesterday I did exactly what I set out to do: visited three pubs and read an entire book.

The book, David Frum's Trumpocracy, should be required reading by Republicans. Frum is a Republican, don't forget; he's trying to put his party, and his country's shared values, back together. As a Democrat, I found his critique of President Trump and the current GOP's policies insightful and well-written. I don't agree with Frum's politics entirely, but I do agree with him fundamentally: disagreement between the parties is healthy when we agree on the fundamentals of what it means to be American.

The pubs were entirely less controversial.

First: The Anglesea Arms, Hammersmith, where I had a St. Aubell Tribute Cornish Pale Ale. Second: The Dove, also in Hammersmith, where I had a Hammerton N1 American Pale Ale and some foccacia with olive oil. (I'm trying to appreciate some pubs, not get sloshed.)

Both pubs were comfortable, classic English pubs. The Dove was more classic (it opened in the 17th Century), but the Anglesea Arms was more comfortable. I'd go back to either in a minute.

The third pub, where I read about half of Frum's book, is my third-favorite pub in the world*: The Blackbird in Earls Court. Over three hours, I sipped a couple of Fuller's ESBs and had their amazing steak and ale pie.

I may post some photos when I get back, but the glass over my phone's camera is all jacked up and I didn't bring my real camera.

Today I also plan to read a book and visit three pubs, and for the entire trip (including the flight home), I aim to finish four books and visit 10 pubs. And as it's already 11:30, I should get cracking.

* After Duke of Perth in Chicago and Southampton Arms in Gospel Oak, London, which I plan to visit tomorrow.

What a day. I thought I'd have more time to catch up on reading up to this point, but life intervened. So an hour from now, when I'm cut off from all telecommunications for 9 hours, I plan to sleep. And if I wake, I'll read these articles that I'm leaving open in Chrome:

• More fun from The Daily WTF
• A Chinese research paper on cyber sovereignty (recommended by Bruce Schneier)
• Gulliver predicting the demise of the A380
• My local business newspaper predicting problems for Illinois because of the Durbin-Trump feud
• Washington's local newspaper predicting problems for the U.S. if the president can't make a deal to keep the government open
• New York's local newspaper reporting on the lawsuits around Net Neutrality
• The Washington Post reminding me that Chicago isn't really that cold

And now, I head to my airplane.

I spent over 3 hours in my car today in principal because there were no public transit options to my remote, suburban destination. That, plus all-day meetings, means that instead of outlining what I'm planning for the weekend—I'll do that tomorrow—I'm just going to line up some articles I want to read:

• The Daily WTF explains why medical insurance is so expensive.
• The Intercept describes a reporter's life in the War on Terror.
• Jeet Heer calls the president an abusive patriarch, not a toddler.
• Don Norman explains how bad design caused the "human" error that freaked out all of Hawai'i over the weekend.
• Google can find a painting that looks just like you. Creepy, or cool?

I now have to pack. Parker will be unhappy with this.

A few links to click tomorrow when I have more time:

• What, exactly, is President Trump's genius?
• What, exactly, is his definition of treason?
• How are cities measuring the "Uber Effect?"
• Chicago had more tourists in 2017 than ever.
• Facial recognition is coming to retail.
• Sullivan comments on #MeToo.
• Fallows on Republicans in Congress.
• Hanselman on the Azure IoT Arduino Cloud DevKit.
• Finally, the UK is planting a coast-to-coast forest of 50 million trees.

And now, I rest.

I'm not referring to the 14°C drop in temperatures over four hours yesterday, though that did suck. (And it did drench me.)

No, I'm talking about how, after calling countries that have dark-skinned citizens "shitholes," the best President we have right now abruptly cancelled a visit to the UK to dedicate our new (and ugly, and inconveniently-located) embassy on the south bank of the Thames:

The president claimed on Twitter that the reason for calling off the trip was his displeasure at Barack Obama having sold the current embassy for “peanuts” and built a replacement for $1bn (£750m). “Bad deal,” he wrote.

But the embassy’s plan to move from Mayfair to Nine Elms in London was first reported in October 2008, when George W Bush was still president.

The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said Trump had “got the message” that many Londoners staunchly opposed his policies and actions.

“It appears that President Trump got the message from the many Londoners who love and admire America and Americans but find his policies and actions the polar opposite of our city’s values of inclusion, diversity and tolerance,” Khan said on Friday.

“His visit next month would without doubt have been met by mass peaceful protests. This just reinforces what a mistake it was for Theresa May to rush and extend an invitation of a state visit in the first place.”

It's important to realize that Trump didn't cancel the visit because he feels one way or another about the embassy move. That's a policy detail that, while irksome to one of the closest allies the US has had for two centuries, is not something he would necessarily be aware of unless someone mentioned it on Fox & Friends. No, he doesn't want to go to the embassy dedication because he hates being reminded that he is less popular in London than Robert Mugabe.

I should also point out that our embassy in Grosvenor Square is an ugly building also, but at least it's convenient to Central London and near to many other embassies and missions. It's right across the park from Macdonald House, which used to house the Canadian High Commission and was also sold recently to private developers.

I should also point out that President Trump doesn't like President Bush fils any more than he likes President Obama, but of course Trump would never blame things on the white guy if he doesn't have to. (See, e.g., "shithole countries" comment, above.)

The Washington Post's Fact Checker found that the President made 1,950 false or misleading claims in his first 347 days of office:

As regular readers know, the president has a tendency to repeat himself — often. There are now more than 60 claims that he has repeated three or more times. The president’s impromptu 30-minute interview with the New York Times over the holidays, in which he made at least 24 false or misleading claims, included many statements that we have previously fact-checked.

We currently have a tie for Trump’s most repeated claims, both made 61 times. Both of these claims date from the start of Trump’s presidency and to a large extent have faded as talking points.

One of these claims was some variation of the statement that the Affordable Care Act is dying and “essentially dead.” The Congressional Budget Office has said that the Obamacare exchanges, despite well-documented issues, are not imploding and are expected to remain stable for the foreseeable future. Indeed, healthy enrollment for the coming year has surprised health-care experts. Trump used to say this a lot, but he’s quieted down since his efforts to repeal the law flopped.

An astonishing 85 times, Trump has celebrated a rise in the stock market — even though in the campaign he repeatedly said it was a “bubble” that was ready to crash as soon as the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. Well, the Fed has raised rates three times since the election — and yet the stock market has not plunged as Trump predicted. It has continued a rise in stock prices that began under President Barack Obama in 2009. Again, Trump has never explained his shift in position on the stock market.

At this rate, he'll utter his 2,000th lie as President sometime on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, Chris Cillizza, the Telegraph U.K., the Twitterverse, and Wile E. Coyote have weighed in on the President asserting that he's a "very stable genius."

We might have this guy for another 1,109 days...