US Politics January 2018: "You All Just Got A Lot Richer"

at least i think there's less than a 15% chance of it, so that's pretty good.

no, that is not pretty good, less than .0015% chance of it would be pretty good, "less than a 15% chance of it" is really pretty fucking bad

i seriously think that twitter doesn’t suspend trump because he doesn’t swear

speaking of the pee tape

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html

It’s weird, I thought Trump looked at Drudge, who had the KJU button quote at the top of his site on NYE

xpost -- yeah that's a more than interesting read. Have to wonder what happens next when you've got them saying "Hey, we have all this evidence, y'know."

https://ssli.ebayimg.com/images/g/D7UAAOSwNkJZ8sEc/s-l1600.jpg

Ha, it really is bigger!

BTW, ironic that the same day he took stupid credit for preventing airline deaths in 2017, there now comes a report that coal mining deaths are surging.

(Or at least surging by the standards of that industry)

That’s ... a way to give people their old jobs back in the mines

“yeah your neighbor’s dad, your brother and your uncle all just suffocated so if you’re up for it we have a couple shifts open”

Speaking of which, anyone here read this article? I knew it was bad, but not that bad.

https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/?utm_source=atlfb

That reminded me - this genius wants to bring back uranium mining too.

He should show us how it's done.

It’s weird, I thought Trump looked at Drudge, who had the KJU button quote at the top of his site on NYE

he doesn't look at any websites

the twitter app on his various phones is the only electronic interaction he has with the internet at all

XP...except Mr. Skin

Ohh yeah

he follows Drudge on twitter guess he didn't see it

at least i think there's less than a 15% chance of it, so that's pretty good.

no, that is not pretty good, less than .0015% chance of it would be pretty good, "less than a 15% chance of it" is really pretty fucking bad

oh, i meant "pretty good" sarcastically, sorry

Attending a high school so underfunded that many teachers paid out of pocket to make copies of handouts, Mullins made the National Honors Society. But in eighth grade, an administrator had talked him out of taking the advanced-track classes, telling him his course load looked like too much work for him to handle. Not that he needed much of a push—those classes were filled with the coal-boss kids, who bullied anyone whose dad actually entered a mine.

When Mullins asked his guidance counselor how to apply to college as a junior, she told him that, without having taken advanced classes, it was pointless.

regarding that simpson / fritsch fusion GPS NYT op-ed maura posted ~

As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

o_O

There is a lot of good stuff in that article

xxpost TBF, if you take out the coal-boss kids, that's representative of how a lot of kids get hamstrung by the educational system. But don't worry, Devos the Destroyer will do her damndest to ensure that all kids get hamstrung.

if your parents can't pay for private school tuition, then you don't deserve an education

this overcooks the main quote in the headline but still
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/03/donald-trump-russia-steve-bannon-michael-wolff

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon reportedly told Wolff.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon said of the meeting. “But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.

At this point is anybody really surprised that contempt is the feeling everyone in this asshole’s orbit has for him

Maybe he'll go like Caesar, only with a zillion knives in his back

maybe like the caesar haircut has persisted for millennia, the combover spiral will still be sweeping the galaxy in the year 3030

1) That Bannon interview must have taken place minutes after he was fired.
2) I can totally believe that Bannon, of all in Trump's orbit, is the only one telling the truth when he says he has nothing to do with the Russia stuff.

It does seem increasingly likely to me that this is going to end in something like a coup. Someone(s) in the upper echelons will read a new variation on the shit Donnie Peepants tweeted last night, have a revelatory moment where consideration of their loved ones/America/humanity briefly overwhelms blind obeisance or party loyalty, and just say 'okay, yeah, enough.'

It's a comforting fairy tale, anyway.

(NB, I am not actually any more comforted by the thought of a coup than I am by the continuation of a Trump presidency.)

but he's making america great again folks

it's important to tweet what you feel

Someone(s) in the upper echelons will read a new variation on the shit Donnie Peepants tweeted last night, have a revelatory moment where consideration of their loved ones/America/humanity briefly overwhelms blind obedience or party loyalty

nah

As I said, I think it's a fairy tale myself, but you do have to wonder if any of these venal fuckers realize that the benefits conferred by their current positions might just be curtailed when/if the country becomes a smoking ruin.

Predicting is a bad business nowadays, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict we will _not_ have any of the following:

1. Any kind of "have you no decency at long last" moment from any consequential person in current GOP leadership. (GOP never-Trumpers are, and will remain, a small and mostly ineffectual group of people who sometimes write things.)

2. Actual nuclear war, with North Korea or anyone else.

3. Actual hot civil war (by which I mean large groups of normal people taking up arms against one another).

4. A climate catastrophe that registers as a dramatic difference in everyday life for most people. (By which I do NOT mean a gradual rise in average temperatures, or a gradual increase in the frequency of severe-yet-comprehensible weather events.)

Instead of sudden cathartic cataclysm, I predict decades of this miserable incremental grinding away at everything that decent people hold dear.

Further, I doubt I will _personally_ suffer directly from most of this. Nor will most of you, frankly. It will be those already at the margins, those already downtrodden, whose lives will go from sucking most of the time to sucking all the time. We will lose too many of them, and there will be too much avoidable suffering, before sanity returns.

Happy new year!

xxp yeah the moment for that was like a year ago. even if he literally announced a nuclear strike on Twitter the GOP would just come out of the woodwork to say "uh, that's not how it's done"

btw apparently Paul Ryan just killed the bill requiring Congressional approval to launch a nuclear missile so that's cool

YMP otm

i mean the trump admin source referred to in that fusion op-ed has to be bannon, right?

1. Any kind of "have you no decency at long last" moment from any consequential person in current GOP leadership. (GOP never-Trumpers are, and will remain, a small and mostly ineffectual group of people who sometimes write things.)

Was just thinking about this the other day and realizing that an excoriation of that nature would have like zero impact in post-shame America. 'YOU'RE the one with no decency at long last. Sad!'

It's obvious from the tone of those Bannon quotes that Wolff caught him more or less right as he was being shoved out the door, when he was in full vindictive-nerd-rage mode. These days he's back to being 100% "Hail Trump! He cannot fail, he can only be failed by fair-weather friends and Deep State cucks!"

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon told Wolff in reference to the Trump Tower meeting, per The Guardian.

Bannon did not officially join the Trump campaign until about two months after that meeting.

He told Wolff that if the Trump campaign wanted to set up such a meeting, it should take place “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people.”

just for the historical record:

https://i.imgur.com/mWg7SYD.png

they sell "full trump: bomb cyclone" pomade in the gift shop there iirc

trying to imagine Trump, Jr. meeting in the Eagle Conference Room at an Embassy Suites.

I don't think there will be a have-you-no-shame moment, but I'm still holding out for a Ceausescu-on-the-balcony moment. Hopefully while he campaigns for the midterms. Not to be followed by a violent overthrow, just the balcony moment.

i'm trying to think of the last time he spoke at a public event that wasn't pre-populated with his existing supporters + people paid to stand there. i know if he ever got anywhere near me i would be tempted to just scream "YOU'RE THE WORST, EVERYONE HATES YOU" etc etc at him, and i think that a lot of people feel the same kind of primordial rage when they see him.

a public event not in America, basically.

a Ceausescu-on-the-balcony moment

now i reviewed a lengthy Ceausescu documentary years ago, but i don't remember this.