Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:14 AM and sunset 7:38 PM, for 13h 23m 58s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with 23.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred ninetieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1863, the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry is among the Union forces that assault Confederate-held Perryville, Oklahoma.
Recommended for reading in full —
Judd Legum relates The inside story of how TMZ quietly became America’s most potent pro-Trump media outlet:
Trump was the ideal vehicle for TMZ to break into political coverage. A reality TV host and a creature of celebrity culture pursues the most powerful position in the world?—?all while dishing out TMZ-friendly sound bites on a daily basis.
As Trump has risen, TMZ has quietly emerged as, arguably, the most important pro-Trump outlet in America. Fox News is the largest and best known, but its audience is older and already inclined to support Trump. Breitbart is the most aggressive and strident, but its connection to white nationalism limits its appeal. TMZ attracts a large and diverse audience?—?precisely the folks Trump needed to reach to stitch together a winning coalition.
Stories on TMZ not only gain a wide audience online but also appear on two nationally syndicated daily television shows (TMZ and TMZ Live) that, in most markets, are aired multiple times each day.
Jennifer Rubin asks Is the GOP a lost cause?:
….Consider the following: If Trump is still president in 2020 and still enjoys a strong majority of support among Republicans, what hope would there be for a devoted anti-Trump Republican? He or she would be running in a party convinced that there are “fine people” in league with neo-Nazis, that the press is the enemy of the people, that white working-class people are victims of foreigners, that Christianity is under attack, that Russia isn’t so bad after all, etc. It seems unlikely that a decent, rational person could win the nomination of a party gone (politically speaking) stark-raving mad….
It would seem that those Republicans contemplating a challenge to Trump –as Ohio Gov. John Kasich reportedly is — have to consider the possibility that the GOP is a lost cause. If they would be blocked from running as an independent under so-called “sore loser” rules, then it would make far more sense to run for president as an independent or leader of a new third party. Preparation for that possibility should start sooner rather than later.
Kristen Soltis Anderson contends that Data show that Trump’s real base is 24 percent of the electorate:
….The data – on issues and on Trump himself — keep pointing back to “one-in-four” as the true size of Trump’s base. It is around one in four who like the tweeting, like the insults, the things other people say are mean or unproductive behavior.
If Trump’s job approval erodes to down to this level, that would almost certainly spell electoral doom for Republicans. On the eve of the Pelosi wipe-out of GOP House control in 2006, former President George W. Bush had an approval rating that looked a lot like Trump’s does now, to say nothing of how bad things could get if they fall further.
But one-quarter of the 160 million registered voters in America is still 40 million people. That’s not enough to win re-election, but it’s enough to pack a lot of arenas donning red MAGA hats — and that may be good enough for Trump’s tastes.
Jane Coaston writes that ‘Virtue Signaling’ Isn’t the Problem. Not Believing One Another Is:
….The real problem, of course, isn’t the signaling part: Everyone is signaling all the time, whether it’s about social justice or their commitment to Second Amendment rights or their concerns about immigration law. Those who accuse others of virtue signaling seem angry about the supposed virtues themselves — angry that someone, anyone, appears to care about something they do not. Another Twitter user, defending Donald Trump after the infamous ‘‘Access Hollywood’’ tape, wrote: ‘‘Stop virtue signaling. It doesn’t work. Are you saying you never talked dirty in a [private] conversation?’’ The logic here is not that Trump or his actions were morally correct, but that no one else is, either, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying….
But of course many people do care, about all sorts of things that you or I might disagree with. People on low-lying islands in the Pacific care about climate change. Members of the armed forces care about military spending. Transgender people care about their ability to access public facilities, gay people care about whether they can adopt children and evangelical Christians care about their ability to live out their faith in the workplace. These people have families and friends, and next-door neighbors and dog walkers, who most likely care, too. This caring is not a crime; it is an argument, about what people should value in the first place. And accusations of ‘‘virtue signaling’’ are, more than anything, a way of walking out on that argument and dismissing it altogether — a quick and easy solution for those moments when engaging and listening, agreeing or disagreeing, seem too hard, too challenging, too personal, too dangerous.
(When Trumpists criticize others for virtue signaling, they’re running from the powerful argument that Trump is a living expression of vice.)
Great Big Story tells of The Dog Lifeguards of Italy: