The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

As I noted yesterday, while I'm about as big a fan of Congressional Republicans as the pope is of Saw  films, I think the onus of the government shutdown should fall on Donald Trump's shoulders. Throughout the process, the man contradicted himself more times than Bill Clinton has bit his lower lip in the past 50 years. Call me crazy, but it's difficult to know what a president will or won't sign when he consistently provides conflicting messages on just that. While I don't really fault Congressional Republicans or Democrats for what happened over the weekend, however, I find it quite perplexing, to the point of being comical, how Republicans in general have responded to said shutdown. In a newly released NBC News poll, which was conducted after the start of the shutdown, here were a few of the results: Who's to blame for the government shutdown? Democrats/Independents: 54.4% Trump, 23.9% Republicans (78.3% combined), 18.1% Democrats (net +60.2% Republicans/-6...

Since the federal government shut down at midnight on Saturday, January 20th, the Republican and Democratic parties have taken turns pointing fingers at one another for blame. Republicans have tried referring to the situation as Schumer Shutdown, in reference to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, claiming he and the Democratic Party have taken the government hostage over DACA. Many Democrats have come forth with the attack, "The GOP controls all three parts of government! How can they blame the minority?" While I could sit here and nitpick the two parties' rationales and get fancy by casting a specific percentage of blame to both, I'm not going to do that. This isn't the Schumer Shutdown and isn't even the McConnell Shutdown; it's the Trump Shutdown. Period. Donald Trump doesn't know what in the hell he's doing. He's like a 5-year-old who was just handed the keys to a Mercedes, has surrounded himself with blind men, is being provided direc...

I had some fun with the trending hashtags #LaborDay, #DACA, and #NeverForget on Twitter over the past week. Here are my posts, ordered from the most popular to the least popular (all my tweets can be read here: https://twitter.com/CraigRozniecki ): 1) Trump: "Nothing says make America great again like ending children's dreams, believe me." #DACA 70 Likes, 32 Retweets 2) Trump: "What I'm gonna do is change DACA to DAFWA, or Deferred Action for Foreign Wife Arrivals." #DACA 59 Likes, 22 Retweets 3) #LaborDay, a day to celebrate workers, as this man celebrates yet another day of not working. 39 Likes, 26 Retweets 4) Trump: "Nobody works harder at doing nothing than I do, believe me." #LaborDay 34 Likes, 18 Retweets 5) While we should #NeverForget 9/11, we should also stop ignoring the opioid crisis, gun violence, and climate change. 38 Likes, 13 Retweets 6) Trump: "DACA? What even is DACA? A dish of some kind? I bet Trump Towe...

On Friday, Iowa Representative Steve King (Republican) voted to end the program known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which "exempts many undocumented immigrants who arrived as children from deportation for a renewable two-year period and allows them to work in the United States," as reported by Paige Lavender of The Huffington Post . King, along with Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, were then confronted by "DREAMers" Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas in Iowa. Upon being confronted, Paul quickly left, before Andiola told King that she's a DREAMer, who was born in Mexico, but raised in the U.S., and graduated from Arizona State University. She then told the Iowa Representative, "I know you want to get rid of DACA, so I want to give you the opportunity 'cause you really want to get rid of it, just rip mine. Go ahead and do that," as she handed him her identification card. She added, "I just don't understand why you've bee...