US Politics, June 2018: This is a total goat rodeo.

those clever bastards

My Trump Home Mattress Collection by Serta is setting records--they are really phenomenal. You can order them at http://t.co/oeCVxEGZ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2012

^^^ a real tweet

So sad.

Fox ad execs are having difficulty selling ads for Hannity and Laura Ingraham. “The pro-Trump thing isn’t working,” one staffer says. “We can’t monetize DACA and the wall and that right-wing shit.”https://t.co/4BfIq9Efxy

— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) June 4, 2018

Ad revenue is not the only way to monetize supporting the Trump admin though...

good lede!

Hahah!

JUST IN: U.S. Special Counsel Mueller says ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has attempted to tamper with potential witness - court filing pic.twitter.com/9Dcxi9YGyw

— Reuters Politics (@ReutersPolitics) June 5, 2018

New filing: Mueller's team says there's "probable cause to believe that Manafort has violated 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b) by attempting to tamper with potential witnesses while on pretrial release and, accordingly, has violated the conditions of his release."https://t.co/qKYaCdarwO

— Ellis Kim (@elliskkim) June 5, 2018

Well, there goes any chance of getting him to cooperate, probably.

Good thing he wasn't deeply involved in the Trump campaign or anything.

I mean, I heard he just brought them coffee or something.

Love too hear about manaforts upcoming pardon

meanwhile, only a 148 or so of the nearly 290,000 documents seized from Michael Cohen are considered privileged.

Well, there goes any chance of getting him to cooperate, probably.

On the contrary, I think this concentrates the mind wonderfully.

witness tampering was manafort's plan D. now maybe he'll move on to plan E, flight to avoid prosecution.

I'd love to see him try it.

my guess is it's that, or else seek asylum in the Ukrainian embassy. the Russian embassy would just be too embarrassing.

Oh for dumb.

Rudy on Trump Dictating Statement: We didn't lie. It was a mistake! "It was a mistake. I swear to god, it was a mistake. The guy made a mistake." pic.twitter.com/2cAIl6vHKF

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 5, 2018

First time for everything, I guess.

Giuliani's position clarified: when I take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then I don't really need to bother about thinking carefully about what I say, because I can always "correct" it later on when someone notices my sworn testimony wasn't truthful. No big deal. I tell all my clients not to sweat about telling the truth under oath. Say whatever comes to mind. It's not like it matters.

It's increasingly difficult to argue convincingly that it does.

Hey, even Mister Rogers made mistakes, am I right?

This is something.

Amazing. CNN reporting Pompeo told Trump it would be "counterproductive" to allow Bolton to attend the Oval Office meeting with visiting North Korean official Kim Yong Chol. Non trivial probability Bolton doesn't last much longer. https://t.co/Ri5MCb9LMp

— Tom Wright (@thomaswright08) June 5, 2018

Cadet Bone Spurs cancels Philadelphia Eagles visit: http://wnep.com/2018/06/04/president-trump-cancels-philadelphia-eagles-visit-to-white-house/amp/

In response to Trump’s announcement, former Eagles receiver Torrey Smith, who was a member of the championship team and was traded during the off-season, called the move “a cowardly act.”

“So many lies smh Here are some facts 1. Not many people were going to go 2. No one refused to go simply because Trump ‘insists’ folks stand for the anthem 3. The President continues to spread the false narrative that players are anti military,” he said in one tweet.

Smith continued: “There are a lot of people on the team that have plenty of different views. The men and women that wanted to go should’ve been able to go. It’s a cowardly act to cancel the celebration because the majority of the people don’t want to see you. To make it about the anthem is foolish.”

This kind of validates that Jon Schwarz tweet Morbious shared upthread. Very dangerous for the Dems to demand that our insane president achieve an impossible and hawkish result out of the summit.

Democratic Senators to Trump: Any deal with N. Korea must completely dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs permanently—oh, and please keep us in the loop on plans before negotiations ­begin.https://t.co/SZD11H4wgY

— Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) June 5, 2018

Some hilarity here as one Ted Cruz attempts to explain himself in a Twitter thread:

On the question of whether a president can pardon himself, we're seeing an abundance of knee-jerk partisanship and dishonest journalism.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 5, 2018

wonder how this Eagles thing is playing out in the swing state of Philadelphia

lmaooo

We have had many Championship teams recently at the White House including the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros, Pittsburgh Penguins, New England Patriots, Alabama and Clemson National Champions, and many others. National Anthem & more great music today at 3:00 P.M.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

....@NASCAR and Champion @MartinTruex_Jr were recently at the White House. It was a great day for a great sport!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

Featuring such hits as the National Anthem and more!

by Radiohead!

greeeat

A “pro-white” marcher in the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally was just elected to a Republican Party post in Washington state https://t.co/dNBg49HLbs

Via @KELLYWEILL

— Sam Stein (@samstein) June 5, 2018

The piece of paper certified that Allsup was now a precinct committee officer for the Whitman County, Washington Republican Party.

whit(e)man count(r)y morelike

whitman county is right next to moscow, mueller needs to look into this

btw FOX News showing images of Eagles players kneeling while praying and NOT during the anthem (in fact, none of them did) feels extra propagandish

the defeatism this month is really starting to piss me off. people looking at the approval polls as if they make a hen's lick of difference. it takes time and effort to hate somebody, and if people don't want to waste their time disapproving of the president this month, i'm not bothered by it. i know silver is only feeding us obsessives' demand for data, but data is, at this point, of no actual use, because it tells us absolutely nothing about what will happen in november. we have a president who thinks he's andrew jackson but is actually john quincy adams, and i'm not going to predict how it plays out, historical precedent is just as much cherry-picking as polls, but a bloodbath wouldn't surprise me.

i do think the whitman county thing is more important than tombot gives it credit for, because republican party policy is set in places where the republican party is powerful - on the west coast that's out east, places like whitman county in wa and malheur in or. it's the reverse of the problem the democratic party has re: gerrymandering - republicans in cities, which is to say the numerical majority of them, don't count for shit. what counts is the racists who only go to the cities to start street fights with antifa and then go home and elect somebody who believes what they believe to congress.

Presidential Job Approval Ratings for Barack Obama, 2010

Approve Disapprove No opinion
2010 Jun 28-Jul 4 46 45 9
2010 Jun 21-27 45 46 9
2010 Jun 14-20 47 45 8
2010 Jun 7-13 46 46 8

stop trying to make me feel sorry for jeff sessions you fuck

The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself...I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined...and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2018

They’re taking a leaf from the religious righr’s book: run for city council/school board and introduce boilerplate legislation c+p’d from [their right-wing think-tank of choice].

So many lives ruined :(

I might feel sorry for Jeff Sessions if someone ran him through a human-sized Veggetti slicer. Otherwise, nah.

xp okay who the hell is he referring to there? this is breaking my brain

I think we thought it was Hope Hicks? Because the media circus is obviously the worst thing that happened to her.

Always safe to assume that Little Lord Flatulence is referring to the one person in the world that he recognizes as real.

btw FOX News showing images of Eagles players kneeling while praying and NOT during the anthem (in fact, none of them did) feels extra propagandish

just to add to this I'm sure FOX will not offer any sort of retraction or clarification on this while CNN had to spend an entire day apologizing for implying that Trumps "animals" comment was directed at immigrants in general, even though it clearly was

i feel like if you're scrutinising trump's tweets for correlations to objective reality your brain might alreayd be broken tbh

(People of the future, please note that bizarro's post was written prior to the point when reality underwent a wholesale renovation during one of our quad-monthly Infrastructure Weeks and had a gaudy, 40-ft. high TRUMP bolted to its side.)

(We have as yet failed to recognize that our emperor has clearly been fully-dressed this whole time, but we'll come to our senses soon enough.)

ha ha ha like yeah sure there will be people in the future, get the fuck outta here with that crazy talk

I say 'people of the future', you say 'horribly mutated survivors of multiple apocalypses who only resemble us inasmuch as they're wearing our tattered skins to keep warm'. Let's stop splitting hairs.

WH official tells me -- last Thurs, the Eagles submitted 70+ names to attend. On Fri, Eagles tried to resked event for days when POTUS was gonna be in Singapore. On Mon, they said the group avail on pre-planned date wld be TWO or THREE players + owner + MASCOT.

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) June 5, 2018