Otherwise...

Kevin Drum on the president:

Let's roll the tape. Trump is vain. He's peculiarly unwilling to learn anything new. He feels endlessly persecuted. His attention span can be measured in minutes. He's paranoid over the slightest sign of disloyalty. He is vengeful. He demands constant attention. He makes up preposterous fictions to sustain his worldview and shield his ego from the slings and arrows of reality. He desperately wants to be liked by everyone. He's domineering. His personal relationships are almost entirely transactional. He never laughs. He can't stand people poking fun at him. He's often unable to control his emotional outbursts...

Otherwise, he's well qualified to be President of the United States.

But Drum left out his most salient characteristic: stupidity.

Normalizing The Wiggle

Photo: Wiggle/SFMTA

The whole point of The Wiggle is to allow cyclists to speed through that densely populated lower Haight neighborhood to get downtown or wherever they're going in such a hurry. 

Which is why the MTA's photo above showing no bikes on The Wiggle could be a parody of that agency's relentless campaign to redesign city streets on behalf of a small minority of cyclists, a cause with a PC "progressive" patina and an effective lobbying organization in the Bicycle Coalition. 

That's why the MTA hires former Streetsblog and Coalition employees to do public relations for its ongoing anti-car, pro-bike campaign that is based on the safety lie.

Never mind pedestrian safety, The Wiggle is green and cool---for cyclists, that is.

Note, too, the two women wearing headscarves. The MTA wants you to know that it's multicultural! Even Muslim women can walk safely on The Wiggle! Recall its lame "peace" campaign several years ago after Pamela Geller paid for those anti-terrorism ads on Muni buses.

When they get a chance, people in the neighborhood are skeptical about how The Wiggle encourages cyclists to speed through their neighborhood. See the comments here and here.

Jonathan Chait

Jonathan Chait in New York magazine:

By the standards of a comprehensive health-care-reform bill, the [Republican]American Health Care Act is very simple. It’s a huge redistribution of income. The various moving parts in the bill mostly boil down to removing subsidies from the poor and sick and burdens from the rich and healthy...Republicans promised to repeal both sources of financing for the law. But they couldn’t make the numbers add up if they eliminated all the financing sources in Obamacare, so they left the spending cuts in place, and instead focused on repealing the part that Republicans in Washington hate the most: taxes on the rich. So the bill is built on a tax cut of about a trillion dollars over a decade that benefits the rich almost exclusively...